by Thomas Mann
“What you are preaching is pragmatism,” Settembrini responded, “and you need only transfer it to the political realm to perceive how totally destructive it is. Whatever profits the state is good, true, and just. Its salvation, its dignity, its power is the criterion of morality. Fine—and with that you have opened the door wide for every sort of crime. And as for human truth, justice for the individual, democracy—well, you’ll see what becomes of them.”
“I move we apply a little logic here,” Naphta retorted. “Either Ptolemy and the scholastics are right, and the world is finite in time and space, which means that God is transcendent and the polarity of God and world is maintained, so that man, too, leads a dualistic existence, and the problem of his soul rests in the conflict between what his senses register and what transcends his senses, making all social issues entirely secondary—this is indeed the only form of individualism that I recognize as logically consistent. Or, conversely, your Renaissance astronomers discovered the truth, and the cosmos is infinite, which means there is no world that transcends the senses, no dualism; the world beyond is absorbed into this world, the polarity of God and nature is annulled, and since the human personality is no longer the battlefield of two hostile principles, but rather harmonious and unified, all human conflict stems from the clash between the interests of the individual and of society as a whole, and so the purposes of the state become the law of morality, just as in good old heathen days. It’s either one or the other.”
“I protest,” Settembrini cried, holding his teacup out at arm’s length toward his host. “I protest your insinuation that the modern state dooms the individual to the hell of slavery. And I protest yet a third time, against the harrowing alternative you have presented us with: Prussianism or Gothic reaction. The sole purpose of democracy is to provide an individualistic corrective to the absolutism of the state. Truth and justice are the crown jewels of individual morality; and should a conflict arise with the interests of the state, they may very well appear to be hostile to it, but in fact are directed toward the state’s higher—one may even say, transcendent—good. The Renaissance as the origin of the deification of the state? What sham logic! The achievements that the Renaissance and the Enlightenment wrested from the past—and may I emphasize, my dear sir, the struggles contained in that verb—were individual human personality, human rights, and human freedom.”
His listeners, who had held their breath during Herr Settembrini’s grand rejoinder, breathed out again now. Hans Castorp could not help slamming his hand, though with restraint, on the edge of the table. “Brilliant!” he said with clenched teeth. And even Joachim seemed deeply satisfied, despite what had been said about Prussianism. But then they both turned back to the other disputant, who had just been rebuffed—Hans Castorp, in fact, with such eagerness that he placed both elbows on the table and propped his chin in one hand, much as he had when drawing his pig, so that he was staring from close up directly into Herr Naphta’s face.
He sat silent, his skinny hands in his lap, a caustic look on his face. “I was attempting to introduce logic into our conversation,” he said, “and you have replied with high-mindedness. I am more or less aware that the Renaissance gave birth to what is known as liberalism, individualism, humanistic citizenship, and all that. But your emphasis on that verb leaves me cold, inasmuch as the heroic age that ‘wrested’ your ideals came to an end long ago—those ideals are dead, or at best lie twitching in their death throes, and those whom they had hoped to finish off have got their foot in the door again. You call yourself, if I am not mistaken, a revolutionary. But you are badly mistaken if you think that future revolutions will end in freedom. After five hundred years, the principle of freedom has outlived its usefulness. A pedagogic method that regards itself as a daughter of the Enlightenment and employs educational methods based on criticism, on the liberation and nursing of the ego, on the breaking down of ordained living patterns—such a pedagogy may still achieve moments of rhetorical success, but for those who know and understand, it is, beyond all doubt, sublimely backward. All institutions dedicated to genuine education have always known that there can be only one central truth in any pedagogy, and that is: absolute authority and an ironclad bond—discipline and sacrifice, renunciation of the ego and coercion of the personality. It is ultimately a cruel misunderstanding of youth to believe it will find its heart’s desire in freedom. Its deepest desire is to obey.”
Joachim sat up straight. Hans Castorp blushed. Herr Settembrini twirled his handsome moustache excitedly.
“No!” Naphta continued. “The mystery and precept of our age is not liberation and development of the ego. What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is—terror.”
He had uttered this last word more softly than any he had spoken thus far—and without gestures, at most, a quick flash of his glasses. All three of his listeners had flinched, even Settembrini, who quickly recovered, however, and smiled.
“And might one inquire,” he asked, “who or what—you see, I’m all ears, I don’t even know how to put my question—who or what, do you believe, will be the agents of this—I do not gladly repeat the word—this terror?”
Naphta sat silent, his eyes sparkling, a caustic look on his face. He said, “I am at your service. I don’t believe I am mistaken in assuming we are agreed in our presupposition of an ideal primal condition of man, a stateless condition that knew no compulsion, where the relationship to God was direct and childlike, where there was neither sovereignty nor service, no law, no punishment, no injustice, no union of the flesh, no class differences, no labor, no property, but only equality, fraternity, and moral perfection.”
“Very good. I agree,” Settembrini declared. “I agree except for the point about union of the flesh, which obviously must always have been the case, since man is a highly developed vertebrate, no different from other animals.”
“As you wish. I am merely establishing fundamental agreement as to man’s original, paradisial condition, without law and with a direct childlike relation to God, all of which was lost in the Fall. I believe we can walk side by side a little farther down this path by tracing the state to a social contract, which takes sin into account and protects against injustice and which we both therefore regard as the origin of sovereign authority.”
“Benissimo!” Settembrini exclaimed. “Social contract—that’s the Enlightenment, that’s Rousseau. I would never have thought—”
“Beg your pardon, but we now come to a parting of the ways. Given the fact that all sovereignty and authority were originally vested in the people, who then transferred all legislative and other powers to their prince, your school of thought deduces, first and foremost, the people’s right to revolt against the crown. Whereas we—”
“We?” Hans Castorp thought, listening intently. “Who is ‘we’? I definitely must ask Settembrini later who it is he means by ‘we.’ ”
“—we, for our part,” Naphta continued, “are perhaps no less revolutionary than you, but we have always deduced, first and foremost, the supremacy of the Church over the secular state. For even if the state’s ungodliness were not branded on its brow, one need only note a simple historical fact—that its origins can be traced to the will of the people and not, like those of the Church, to divine decree—and thereby prove that the state is, if not exactly a manifestation of evil, then at least a manifestation of dire necessity and sinful shortcomings.”
“The state, my dear sir—”
“I know what you think of the nation-state. ‘Above all else, love of the fatherland and a boundless hunger for glory. ‘ That is Virgil. You amend him with a little liberal individualism, and call it democracy; but your fundamental relationship to the state remains completely untouched. You are apparently not disturbed by the fact that money is its soul. Or would you contest that? Antiquity was capitalist because it idolized the state. The Christian Middle Ages clearly saw that the secular state was inherently capitalist. ‘Money will become our
emperor’—that is a prophecy from the eleventh century. Do you deny that it has literally come true, making life itself a veritable hell?”
“My dear friend, you have the floor. I am impatient to make the acquaintance of the great unknown that is the agent of terror.”
“Brash curiosity for a spokesman of a social class that is itself the agent of the freedom that has ruined the world. If need be, I can do without your counterarguments—I am quite familiar with the political ideology of the bourgeoisie. Your goal is a democratic empire, the world-state, the apotheosis of the principle of the nation-state on a universal plane. And the emperor of your empire? We know him. Yours is a gruesome utopia, and yet—on this very point we find ourselves more or less in agreement. For there is something transcendent about your capitalist world republic—indeed, the world republic is the transcendent secular state, and we are one in our faith that on some distant horizon a final perfect condition awaits mankind that will correspond to his original perfect condition. Since the days of Gregory the Great, the founder of the City of God on earth, the Church has seen it as her task to bring mankind back under divine rule. His papal claim to temporal authority was not made for its own sake; proxy dictatorship was, rather, a means, a path to a redemptive goal, a transitional phase from the heathen state to the kingdom of heaven. You have spoken to our pupils here about the Church’s bloody deeds and her chastening impatience—but that was very foolish of you, for the zeal of the godly cannot, by definition, be pacifistic. And Gregory himself said: ‘Cursed be the man who holds back his sword from shedding blood.’ We know power is evil. But if the kingdom is to come, the dualism between good and evil, between this world and the next, between power and the Spirit, must be temporarily abrogated and transformed in a principle that unites asceticism and dominion. That is what I call the necessity of terror.”
“But its agent! Its agent!”
“You even ask? Can it be your Manchester eyes have failed to notice the existence of a social theory that promises the victory of man over economics, a social theory whose principles and goals coincide exactly with those of the Christian City of God? The Church fathers called ‘mine’ and ‘yours’ pernicious words, described private property as usurpation and thievery. They repudiated private ownership, since, according to the divine law of nature, the earth is the common property of all mankind and therefore its fruits are likewise intended for the common use of all. They taught that only greed, itself a consequence of the Fall, defends the rights of property, since it also invented exclusive ownership. They were humane enough, anticommercial enough, to call economic activity per se a danger to the salvation of the soul, that is, to humanity. They hated money and finance and called capitalist wealth fuel for the fires of hell. With all their hearts they despised the economic principle that declares price is the result of the workings of supply and demand, and they damned those who lived by the fluctuations of the market as exploiters of their neighbors. Even more blasphemous in their eyes was another form of exploitation, that of time—the monstrosity of receiving a bonus, that is, interest paid on money, from the simple passage of time and thereby perverting a universal divine institution, time itself, to one’s own advantage and the detriment of others.”
“Benissimo!” Hans Castorp cried, availing himself in his eagerness of Herr Settembrini’s favorite expression of approval. “Time . . .as a universal divine institution—now that is extremely important!”
“Indeed it is,” Naphta remarked. “These humane minds were disgusted by the idea of wealth increasing automatically and placed all speculation and transactions involving interest under the rubric of usury, making every rich man either a thief or the heir of a thief. They went even further. Like Thomas Aquinas, they regarded trade in general—the basic commercial act of buying and selling for a profit without having altered or improved the product—as a despicable occupation. They were not inclined to assign a high value to labor in and of itself, because it is an ethical, not a religious act, performed in the service of life, not of God. And since labor was concerned exclusively with life and its maintenance, they demanded that both personal profit and public esteem be measured by the productive effort involved. They considered the peasant and the craftsman honorable people, but not the merchant or the industrialist. They wanted goods to be produced on the basis of need and loathed the idea of mass production. Well, then—after having been buried for centuries, all these economic principles and standards have been resurrected in the modern movement of communism. The correspondence is perfect, down to the meaning of international labor’s claim of dominion over international marketeering and speculation. In the modern confrontation with bourgeois-capitalist rot, the world’s proletariat embodies the humanity and criteria of the City of God. The point of the dictatorship of the proletariat, the political-economic demand for salvation in our time, is not dominion for its own sake and for all eternity, but only a temporary abrogation of the polarities of mind and Spirit under the sign of the cross. It is a way of overcoming the world by ruling the world, a transition; its point is transcendence, the kingdom itself. The proletariat has taken up Gregory the Great’s task, his godly zeal burns within it, and its hands can no more refrain from shedding blood than could his. Its work is terror, that the world may be saved and the ultimate goal of redemption be achieved: the children of God living in a world without classes or laws.”
So ended Naphta’s caustic oration. The little gathering was silent. The young men looked to Herr Settembrini—they would take their cue from him.
“Amazing,” he said. “I certainly must admit my shock—I had not expected this. Roma locuta. And what a speech! With our very own eyes, we have witnessed a hieratic death-defying leap—and if that is a contradiction in terms, then Herr Naphta has ‘temporarily abrogated’ it. Ah, yes. I repeat, it is amazing. Can you even conceive that there might be any objections, professor—even objections based purely on consistency? You attempted a while ago to help us understand a Christian individualism founded in the dualism between God and the world, and tried to prove its preeminence over all politically determined morality. A few minutes later you are advocating a socialism that ends in dictatorship and terror. How do you reconcile the two?”
“Opposites,” Naphta said, “may very well be reconciled. But what is mediocre and makeshift will never be. Your individualism, as I made bold to remark before, is a makeshift thing, a series of concessions. It corrects your heathen state morality with a little Christianity, a little ‘individual rights,’ a little so-called freedom, that is all. Whereas an individualism that proceeds from the cosmic, astrological importance of the individual soul, an individualism that is not social, but religious, that experiences its humanity not as a contradiction between self and society, but between self and God, between flesh and Spirit—such a genuine individualism can be reconciled very nicely with a community rich in ties of commitment and obligation.”
“So it’s both anonymous and communal,” Hans Castorp said.
Settembrini looked at him wide-eyed. “Silence, my good engineer!” he commanded with a severity attributable to his own nervous tension. “You may learn, but please do not perform.” And now turning back to Naphta he said, “That is one possible answer, but only one. It comforts me a little. But let us confront it in all its consequences. Along with industry, your Christian communism rejects technology, the machine, progress itself. In denying what you call marketeering, the world of money and finance, which antiquity valued much more than farming and handicrafts, it also denies freedom. For it is as clear as clear can be that, just as in the Middle Ages, all private and public relationships will be bound to the soil, even—and I do not find it easy to say this—even the individual personality. If only the soil can provide a living, then it alone can provide freedom. Craftsmen and peasants, no matter in what honor they may be held, own no land, they are vassals of those who do own it. Indeed, until well into the late Middle Ages, the majority of people, even those in the cities, we
re vassals. Here and there in the course of our discussion, you have made mention of human dignity. But now you are advocating an economic system whose morality deprives the individual of freedom and dignity.”
“There is much that we might say about dignity or the lack thereof,” Naphta replied. “For now, I would be most gratified if in this context you might find reason to see freedom less as a lovely gesture and more as a problem. You maintain that the morality of Christian economics, with all its beauty and humanity, creates men who are not free. I, on the other hand, declare that the issue of freedom—or, to put it more concretely, the issue of cities—as highly moral an issue as it may be, is historically associated with a most inhuman degeneration of economic morality, with the many horrors of modern marketeering and speculation, with the satanic rule of money, with commerce.”