by Thomas Mann
It was only a few minutes’ walk from the Berghof down to the little house with the grapevine twined about its door. They entered, passed the door to the grocery on the right, and climbed a set of narrow brown stairs that brought them to another door. There was only one name on the plate beside the bell: Lukaček, Ladies’ Tailor. The door was answered by a half-grown lad with close-trimmed hair and red cheeks; he was dressed in a kind of uniform—a striped footman’s jacket and gaiters. They asked for Professor Naphta and, since they had no calling cards, made sure he could repeat their own names. He left them there, saying he would inform Herr Naphta—he used no title. A door stood open immediately opposite, and they could see into the tailor’s shop, where Lukaček, despite its being Sunday, was sitting cross-legged atop a table, sewing. He was a pale, bald man; from beneath an oversize, drooping nose, a black moustache hung down morosely on both sides of his mouth.
“Good afternoon,” Hans Castorp said.
“How do,” the tailor said in Swiss dialect, although that seemed to match neither his name nor appearance and sounded rather false and odd.
“Working so hard, even on a Sunday?” Hans Castorp added with a nod.
“It’s urgent,” Lukaček replied curtly and took a stitch.
“Something elegant, I suppose,” Hans Castorp guessed. “It’s needed right away for a ball or party, is that it?”
The tailor left the question unanswered, bit off his thread, and threaded again. After a while he nodded in agreement.
“Will it be pretty?” Hans Castorp asked anew. “Will it have sleeves?”
“Yep, sleeves, it’s for an ol’ lady,” Lukaček replied with a heavy Bohemian accent. The page returned to interrupt their conversation, which had been carried on through the open door. Herr Naphta would be pleased to receive the gentlemen, he reported, and asked them to follow; he opened another door, two or three steps farther on the right, behind which was a heavy portiere that he also lifted aside for the young men to enter. Standing there in slippers on a moss-green carpet, Naphta greeted his guests.
Both cousins were surprised by the luxury of the two-windowed study into which they had stepped—indeed, they were dazzled, for they had not expected anything of the sort given the shabby little house with its dingy corridor and stairway, in contrast to which Naphta’s furnishings seemed almost fabulously elegant, when in point of fact they weren’t, nor would Hans Castorp or Joachim Ziemssen normally have regarded them as such. But the decor was first-rate, and so ornate that despite the desk and bookcases the room did not have much of a masculine look. There was too much silk, burgundy and purple silk: silk curtains to conceal the shoddy doors, silk valances above the windows, and silk upholstery on a sofa and armchairs grouped at the far end of the room, opposite a second door and directly below a tapestry covering almost the entire wall. The baroque chairs, with little upholstered cushions on the arms, were placed around a circular, brass-trimmed table; behind this stood the sofa, likewise baroque and strewn with silk plush pillows. The bookcases, fitted with glass doors and green silk curtains, filled the walls at the sides of both doors; they were mahogany, as was the desk, or rather the rolltop secretary, which had been placed between the two windows. In the corner, to the left of the sofa and chairs, was a work of art: a painted wooden sculpture set atop a large pedestal draped in red, a profoundly terrifying work, a naive pietà—very effective, almost grotesque. The Mother of God, her hood drawn up, her brows furrowed in agony, her mouth skewed and gaping in lamentation; the Man of Sorrows on her lap, a primitive figure, badly out of scale, the crudely fashioned body revealing an ignorance of anatomy, the drooping head studded with thorns, the face and limbs splattered and dripping with blood, thick globs of congealed blood at the wound in the side, nail marks on the hands and feet—this showpiece definitely lent the silk room a special accent. The wallpaper visible above the bookcases and at the sides of the windows was also apparently the work of the tenant, with vertical stripes in the same green as the soft carpet spread over the simple red floor-covering. Only the low ceiling was more or less beyond help; it was cracked and bare—although a small Venetian chandelier had been hung. The windows were hidden by floor-length cream-colored curtains.
“We’ve come by for our little colloquy,” Hans Castorp said, his eyes directed more at the pious horror in the corner than at the occupant of this surprising room, who was commending the cousins for having kept their word. Gesturing hospitably with his little right hand, he was trying to lead them to the silk-upholstered chairs, but Hans Castorp, as if spellbound, headed straight for the wooden sculpture and stopped in front of it, his hands on his hips and his head tilted to one side.
“What is this you have here?” he said softly. “It’s frightfully good. I’ve never seen such suffering. Very old, of course, is it not?”
“Fourteenth century,” Naphta replied. “Presumably from the Rhineland. You’re impressed, aren’t you?”
“Enormously,” Hans Castorp said. “It couldn’t help making an impression on one. I would never have thought that anything could be simultaneously so ugly—beg your pardon—and so beautiful.”
“Works of art from a world in which the soul expresses itself,” Naphta responded, “are always beautiful to the point of ugliness and ugly to the point of beauty. It is indeed a law. We are dealing with beauty of the Spirit, not of the flesh, which is basically stupid. And abstract, as well,” he added. “The beauty of the body is abstract. Only inner beauty, the beauty of religious expression, possesses true reality.”
“How kind of you to define and differentiate the matter so clearly,” Hans Castorp said. “Fourteenth?” he inquired, just to be sure. “Thirteen hundred and something? Yes, perfect textbook Middle Ages—I see in it, as it were, some notions about the Middle Ages that I’ve been working on of late myself. Actually, I never knew anything about the period. I’m a man of technology and progress, to the extent my opinions count in this world. But up here the whole issue of the Middle Ages has been brought home to me in various ways. Certainly there was no economic social theory in those days, that much is clear. Do you know the artist’s name?”
Naphta shrugged. “What does it matter?” he said. “We should not even ask, because at the time it was created no one asked, either. There is no miracle-worker, no Mr. Individual Creator behind it—it is an anonymous, communal work of art. It comes, of course, from the very advanced Middle Ages, the Gothic—signum mortificationis. You’ll not find the crucifixion glossed over and prettified here, the way the Romanesque period thought it best to deal with things—no kingly crown, no majestic triumph over the world and martyrdom. The entire work is a radical proclamation of suffering and the weakness of the flesh. It is not until the Gothic that tastes turn to true pessimistic asceticism. You’re probably unfamiliar with De miseria humanae conditionis by Innocent the Third—a very witty literary work, from the end of the twelfth century. But only later did this sort of art provide the illustrations for it.”
“Herr Naphta,” Hans Castorp said, heaving a sigh, “every word of everything you’ve said interests me. ‘Signum mortificationis,’ was that it? I shall make a note of it. And just before that you mentioned ‘anonymous and communal,’ which also appears worth some serious thought. Sad to say, you guessed correctly about my not knowing the writings of that pope—I assume Innocent the Third was a pope. Did I understand you to say that the work is ascetic and witty? I must admit I’ve never thought those two things could go hand in hand, but now that I consider it, it seems quite plausible—any discussion of human misery would offer a chance for witty remarks at the expense of the flesh. Is the work to be had somewhere? If I brush up on my Latin perhaps I can read it.”
“I have the book,” Naphta replied, pointing his head toward one of the bookcases. “It is at your disposal. But won’t you please sit down? You can regard the pietà from the sofa. And here’s our afternoon snack—”
The little page had brought tea, plus a pretty silver-trimmed ba
sket containing slices of layer cake. And who should come through the open door behind him—gliding swiftly, smiling delicately, exclaiming, “Zounds!” and “Accidenti!” It was Herr Settembrini, who lived one floor up and just happened to drop by to keep these gentlemen company. He had seen the cousins coming, he said, from his little window and had quickly finished off the encyclopedic page he had been working on, so that he, too, could join the party. His arrival seemed the most natural thing in the world—justified both by his old acquaintance with the Berghof residents and his relationship with Naphta, which despite profound differences of opinion was evidently characterized by regular and very lively visiting back and forth. And, indeed, the host showed no surprise as he casually greeted him as one of their number. All this, however, did not prevent Hans Castorp from gaining two distinct impressions from his arrival. First, he had the feeling that Herr Settembrini had dropped by in order to keep him and Joachim—or, actually, just him—from being left alone with ugly little Naphta and to provide a pedagogic counterweight by his presence; second, it was quite evident that he had no objection to using the occasion to leave his lodgings in the attic for a while, exchanging them for Naphta’s silk-adorned room and a properly served tea. He first rubbed his yellow hands—and a line of black hair grew down the side of each, to just below the little finger—and then helped himself. With obvious relish, indeed with open praise, he dined on layer cake, each narrow, curving slice of which was richly veined with chocolate.
The topic of conversation continued to be the pietà, for Hans Castorp kept both one eye and his remarks fixed on it as he turned now to Herr Settembrini, trying to bring him into critical contact, as it were, with the work of art, even though the humanist’s aversion to this bit of decor could very easily be read from the expression on his face when he twisted around to look at it—he had taken a seat with his back to that particular corner. Too polite to say what he thought, he confined himself to remarks concerning errors in proportion and anatomical defects in the figures; such offenses against the truth of nature did not come close to moving him, he said, since they were based not on any primitive lack of skill but arose out of willful malice, out of an antagonistic principle. And Naphta maliciously agreed, saying that it certainly was not a question of any lack of technical skill. It was, rather, a matter of the emancipation of the Spirit from the bonds of nature, indeed, the work proclaimed a religious contempt for nature by refusing’ to submit to it. But when Settembrini declared that such a neglect of nature and a refusal to study her led humankind down a false path and then began in taut words to contrast an absurd formlessness—to which the Middle Ages and epochs that imitated it were addicted—with classicism, with the Greco-Roman heritage of form, beauty, reason, and serenity born of natural piety, for classicism alone was destined to further the human enterprise, Hans Castorp interrupted him and asked how all that fitted in with Plotinus, who, as was well known, was ashamed of his own body, and with Voltaire, who in the name of reason had rebelled against the scandalous earthquake in Lisbon? Absurd? Yes, this work, too, was absurd, but when one stopped and considered the matter, one could, in his opinion, call absurdity an intellectually honorable position, and so the absurd enmity toward nature in Gothic art was ultimately as honorable as the gesture of a Plotinus or a Voltaire, for it expressed the same emancipation from facts and givens, the same proud unwillingness to be enslaved, the same refusal to submit to dumb powers, that is, to nature.
Naphta broke into that laugh of his that sounded like a porcelain plate and ended in a cough.
Settembrini said loftily, “You wrong our host with your display of wit, for it is equally a display of ingratitude for this delicious cake. But I wonder if gratitude is one of your concerns—that is, presuming one shows gratitude by making good use of gifts received.”
But when Hans Castorp blushed at this, he went on charmingly, “You are known to be a wag, my good engineer. Despite your amiable scoffing at the Good, I do not doubt in the least that you also love it. You know yourself, of course, that the only intellectual protest against nature that can be called honorable is one that keeps in mind the dignity and beauty of man and never one that, even if it does not aim at man’s degradation and debasement, nevertheless accomplishes just that. You are also aware what inhuman abominations, what bloodthirsty intolerance—without which the artifact behind me would not exist—that epoch brought forth. I need only remind you of those who persecuted heretics, dreadful inquisitors like the bloody Konrad of Marburg with his foul priestly rage against everything that resisted his heavenly rule. You, I am sure, would never approve of the sword or the stake as an instrument of brotherly love.”
“All the same, it was in love’s service,” Naphta declared, “that machinery was set in motion by which the cloister cleansed the world of its wicked citizens. All ecclesiastical punishments, even death at the stake, even excommunication, were imposed to save souls from eternal damnation, which cannot be said of the mad exterminations of the Jacobins. Allow me to remark, that every sort of torture, every bit of bloody justice, that does not arise from a belief in the next world is bestial nonsense. And as for the degradation of man, its history coincides exactly with the rise of the bourgeois spirit. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the teachings of nineteenth-century science and economics have omitted nothing, absolutely nothing, that seemed even vaguely useful for furthering such degradation, beginning with modern astronomy—which turned the focal point of the universe, that sublime arena where God and Satan struggled to possess the creature whom they both ardently coveted, into an unimportant little planet, and, for now at least, has put an end to man’s grand position in the cosmos, upon which astrology was likewise based.”
“For now?” And as Herr Settembrini asked his sly question, his expression was much like that of an inquisitor who is waiting for his victim to stumble and confess incontestable crimes.
“Why, of course—for a couple of centuries,” Naphta affirmed coldly. “The honor of the scholastics will be vindicated in this regard as well, if I am not mistaken. Indeed the process is well under way. Copernicus will be routed by Ptolemy. The theory of heliocentrism is now being opposed by intellectual forces whose efforts will presumably attain their desired goal. Science will find itself philosophically constrained once again to grant earth all the honors that Church dogma wished to preserve for it.”
“What? What? Intellectual opposition? Philosophically constrained? Attain their desired goal? What sort of voluntarism are you spouting now? And what about unbiased research? What about pure knowledge? What about the truth, my dear sir, which is so intimately bound up with freedom, and its martyrs—whom you claim have slandered the earth, but who are instead the planet’s most beautiful and everlasting ornaments?”
Herr Settembrini had a forceful way of posing questions. He sat up straight and pelted little Herr Naphta with righteous words, his voice swelling so powerfully toward the end that you could hear just how certain he was that his opponent’s answer could take only one form—embarrassed silence. He had been holding a piece of cake between his fingers as he spoke, but now he laid it back on his plate, unwilling to take a bite after such questions.
“My good friend,” Naphta replied with sour composure, “there is no such thing as pure knowledge. The validity of ecclesiastical science—which can be summarized in Saint Augustine’s statement: ‘I believe, that I may understand’—is absolutely incontrovertible. Faith is the vehicle of understanding, the intellect is secondary. Your unbiased science is a myth. Faith, a world view, an idea—in short, the will—is always present, and it is then reason’s task to examine and prove it. In the end we always come down to ‘quod erat demonstrandum.’ The very notion of proof contains, psychologically speaking, a strong voluntaristic element. The great scholastics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were unanimous in their conviction that nothing could be true in philosophy that was theologically false. Let us set theology aside, if you like. A human race, however, th
at refuses to accept the proposition that nothing can be true in science that is false in philosophy, is not human. The argumentation of the Holy Office against Galileo stated that his theses were philosophically absurd. There can be no more cogent argument than that.”
“Eh, eh! Our poor, great Galileo’s arguments proved to be the more valid ones. No, let’s be serious, professore. Here in the presence of these two attentive young people, answer one question for me, please: Do you believe in truth, in objective, scientific truth? That to strive for it is the highest law of morality? That its triumphs over authority are the most glorious page in the history of the human spirit?”
Heads turned from Settembrini to Naphta—Hans Castorp’s more quickly than Joachim’s. “Such a triumph is an impossibility,” Naphta replied, “because the authority is man himself—his interests, his dignity, his salvation—and there can be no contradiction between man and truth. They coincide.”
“Which means that truth is—”
“Whatever profits man is true. Nature herself is summarized in him; in all of nature, only he is created, and nature is solely for him. He is the measure of all things and his salvation is the criterion of truth. Theoretical knowledge with no practical application in the realm of man’s salvation is so totally uninteresting that we must deny it any value as truth and exclude it entirely. The Christian centuries were united in their view that the natural sciences were of no significance to man. Lactantius, whom Constantine the Great chose to be his son’s tutor, put the question quite directly: how would it help him gain his salvation if he knew the sources of the Nile or the ravings of physicists about the heavens? Try to answer that one sometime! And if Platonic philosophy was preferred above all others, it was because it did not concern itself with the study of nature, but with the study of God. I can assure you that mankind is about to find its way back to this point of view, to recognize that the task of true science is not the pursuit of worthless information, but rather the elimination on principle of what is pernicious, even of what is merely without significance as an idea, and, in a word, to proclaim instinct, moderation, choice. It is childish to believe that the Church defended darkness against the light. Rather, she did what was right, right three times over, in declaring criminal any ‘unbiased’ striving for a knowledge of things, that is to say, any striving that casts aside those spiritual concerns aimed solely at winning salvation. What has led man into darkness, and will continue to lead him ever deeper is ‘unbiased’—that is, a philosophical—natural science.”