The Magic Mountain (82 page)

His health, meanwhile, grew worse—less as a direct result of external severities of the novitiate life, which provided sufficient recreation, than of internal ones. The educational system, in its clever subtlety, both met and encouraged his own natural tendencies. His days and part of his nights were filled with
operationes spirituales
, with examinations of conscience, with introspection, deliberation, and meditation, and he went about it with such malicious, peevish passion that he found himself ensnared in a thousand difficulties, contradictions, and disputes. He was the despair—and the great hope—of his father confessor, whose life he daily made a hell with raging dialectics and a total lack of simplicity. “
Ad haec quid tu?
” Leo would ask, his eyes flashing behind his glasses. And driven into a corner, there was nothing the priest could do except admonish him to pray for his soul to find peace—“
ut in aliquem gradum quietis in anima perveniat
.” Except that, once achieved, such “peace” resulted in a total dulling and deadening of the personality, until a man was a mere tool and his peace that of the graveyard, the eerie external tokens of which Brother Naphta could study in the hollow eyes of faces all around him—and which he would never succeed in achieving, except by way of physical rum.

It spoke well of the spiritual quality of his superiors that his protests and doubts in no way prejudiced the irregard for him. The father provincial himself summoned Naphta at the end of his two-year novitiate, spoke with him, and approved his admission to the order. The young scholastic, having received the four minor orders—doorkeeper, acolyte, lector, and exorcist—and having sworn his “simple” vows, admitting him at last into the Society, now departed for the Jesuit college at Falkenburg in Holland to begin his theological studies.

He was twenty years old at the time, and three years later, thanks to a deleterious climate and intellectual exertion, his inherited illness had advanced to the point where a further stay would have been fatal. A sudden hemorrhage alerted his superiors to the problem; after hovering for weeks between life and death and still in precarious health, he was sent back to where he started. He returned to the institution where he had been a pupil and was given a position as prefect, a supervisor of the students, a teacher of philosophy and humanities. This hiatus was prescribed by regulation in any case—except that one normally returned to college after a few years in order to conclude the seven-year course of instruction. This was now denied to Brother Naphta. His illness continued; his doctor and father superior decided it would be more appropriate for him temporarily to serve pupils where the air was healthy and outdoor farm work available. He received the first of the major orders, which gave him the right to chant the Epistle at solemn mass on Sunday—a right, however, which he never exercised, first because he was completely unmusical and second because illness had left his voice cracked and hardly suitable for singing. He did not advance beyond the subdiaconate—was never ordained deacon or priest. But when both hemorrhages and fever persisted, he had come up here for a long-term cure, which was paid for by his order and was now into its sixth year—hardly a cure by now and more a kind of categorical form of life at rarefied heights, mitigated by his duties as a teacher of Latin at the local school for tubercular boys.

Hans Castorp learned the general outline and details of all this in conversations with Naphta himself during visits to his silken cell, either alone or accompanied by his tablemates, Ferge and Wehsal, whom he had introduced there; or he might meet him out on a promenade and stroll back with him to Dorf. The story came to him on various occasions, in fragments and as connected narratives, and not only did he himself consider it highly remarkable, but he encouraged Ferge and Wehsal to do so as well, which they did—the former, of course, with a qualifying reminder that all higher things were foreign to him (for only the experience of pleural shock had ever lifted him above life’s most unpretentious levels); the latter, however, with obvious pleasure in the happy course an oppressed man’s life had taken, even though—since all good things must come to an end—it was now at a standstill and appeared to be foundering in their common malady.

For his part, Hans Castorp regretted this standstill and thought with pride and concern about honor-loving Joachim, who with one heroic, courageous effort had ripped to shreds the tough fabric of Rhadamanthine rhetoric, sought out his flag, and now, in Hans Castorp’s imagination, stood clutching it, three fingers of his right hand raised to swear his oath of loyalty. Naphta, too, had sworn an oath to a flag; he, too, had been received beneath a banner, as he himself put it when explaining the nature of his order to Hans Castorp. But apparently, given his adaptations and permutations, he was not as loyal as Joachim was to his—although, to be sure, whenever Hans Castorp, both as a civilian and child of peace, listened to this has-been or would-be Jesuit he felt reinforced in his view that each of these two men would take pleasure in the occupation and status of the other, as something closely related to his own. For each was as much a military calling as the other, in every sense: in asceticism and hierarchy, in obedience and Spanish sense of honor. The latter, in particular, prevailed in Naphta’s order, which had originated in Spain and whose rules of spiritual exercise—in some sense the equivalent of those that Frederick the Great later promulgated for his Prussian infantry—were first drawn up in Spanish, so that Naphta frequently used Spanish phrases in his stories and lessons. He would speak of
dos banderas
, of the two flags to which armies rallied for the great struggle—the flags of heaven and hell, the former in the region of Jerusalem, with Christ as the
capitán general
commanding the armies of the good, and the latter on the plains of Babylon, with Lucifer as
caudillo
or chieftain.

Had not the Morning Star been a regular military academy, whose pupils, divided into “divisions,” were honorably exhorted to spiritual-military
bienséance
—a combination “stiff collar” and “Spanish ruff,” if one could put it that way? Ideas of honor and excellence played a significant role in Joachim’s profession—and were equally conspicuous, Hans Castorp thought, in the order in which Naphta had unfortunately been unable to advance very far due to illness. Listening to him, one might believe that the order consisted of nothing but very ambitious officers inspired by a single thought: to make their mark—
insignes esse
, as the Latin had it. According to the teaching and rules of its founder and first general, the Spaniard Loyola, they accomplished more and served more splendidly than those who acted purely out of common sense. Rather, they accomplished their work above and beyond the call of duty (
ex supererogatione
), not only by resisting the insurrections of the flesh (
rebellioni carnis
), which was, after all, the task of every man of average common sense, but also by doing battle against every inclination of the senses, against both love of self and love of the world, against things that are normally permitted. Because in battling the enemy, to attack (
agere contra
) was better and more honorable than simply to defend oneself (
resistere
). Weaken the enemy and break him—those were the instructions in their field handbook; and here again its author, the Spaniard Loyola, was of one mind with Joachim’s own
capitán general
, the Prussian Frederick, whose rule of war was: “Attack! Attack!” “Jump into your enemy’s pants!” “
Attaquez donc toujours!
”

But Naphta’s and Joachim’s worlds had something else special in common: their relationship to blood and the axiom that one should not refrain from shedding it. On that they were in fierce agreement—as worlds, as orders, as professions; and a child of peace found it worth his while to listen to Naphta talk about the martial monks of the Middle Ages, who, although ascetics to the point of exhaustion, were likewise filled with a spiritual lust for power and did not refrain from bloodshed in order to bring about the City of God and its transcendent world dominion; or about belligerent Knights Templar, who considered death in battle against unbelievers more meritorious than death in one’s bed and for whom slaying and being slain for the sake of Christ was no crime, but the highest glory. It helped if Settembrini was not present for such lectures. Otherwise, he played the role, as always, of the bothersome organ-grinder and trumpeted peace, even though he remained hardly averse to his holy, civilizing, patriotic war against Vienna—and Naphta, of course, was sure to repay such passion and weakness with sarcasm and disdain. In any case, whenever the Italian warmed to that cause, Naphta would champion a Christian world citizenship, claim every land and no land as his fatherland, and caustically recall the phrase of Nickel, a former general of the order, who declared patriotism “a plague and the surest death of Christian charity.”

And, of course, what prompted Naphta to call patriotism a plague was asceticism—what all did he not subsume under that concept, what all, in his opinion, did not oppose asceticism and the kingdom of God! Not only our ties to family and homeland did so, but also those to health and life. Asceticism was even his basis for reproaching the humanist whenever he trumpeted peace and happiness; Naphta would belligerently accuse him to his face of love of the flesh (
amor carnalis
) and love of physical comfort (
commodorum corporis
), call it utter bourgeois irreligion to ascribe the least value to life and health.

Then there was the great colloquy on health and sickness, which arose out of differences that became apparent one day, very close to Christmas, as they walked through the snow to Platz and back. They all took part: Settembrini, Naphta, Hans Castorp, Ferge, and Wehsal—all of them slightly feverish, frequently shivering in the Alpine chill, numbed and excited by the walk and the discussion; and, whether, like Naphta and Settembrini, they participated more actively or merely followed the conversation and broke in with only brief remarks, they were all so avidly involved that they often forgot where they were and stopped to form a deeply engrossed, gesticulating group, all speaking at once and blocking the walkway, unconcerned about strangers who had to detour around them or stopped to lend an ear, listening in astonishment to such extravagant talk.

Actually the dispute had started over Karen Karstedt—poor Karen with the open sores on her fingers, who had died recently. Hans Castorp had been unaware of her sudden turn for the worse and exitus; otherwise he would gladly have taken part in her burial, both out of friendship and his admitted love of funerals in general. But the local custom of discretion had meant that he learned of Karen’s demise too late and that she had already been placed in a permanent horizontal position, in the garden of the cupid whose snowy cap was cocked to one side.
Requiem aeternam
. He offered a few friendly words in her memory, which inspired Herr Settembrini to make sarcastic remarks about Hans’s charitable activities—his visits to Leila Gerngross, business-minded Rotbein, overblown Frau Zimmermann, the braggart son of
Tous-les-deux
, and the tormented Natalie von Mallinckrodt—and then went on to sneer at the expensive flowers with which the engineer had shown his devotion to such a totally wretched and ridiculous crew. Hans Castorp had then pointed out that those who had received his attentions, with the exception, for now, of Frau von Mallinckrodt and the lad named Teddy, were all quite dead; in response, Settembrini asked whether that made them any more respectable. There was such a thing, Hans Castorp replied, that one might call Christian reverence for human misery. And before Settembrini could rebuke him, Naphta began to speak of pious excesses of charity witnessed in the Middle Ages, amazing examples of fanaticism and ecstasy in the care of the sick—the daughters of kings had kissed the stinking wounds of lepers, with the express purpose of becoming infected, had called the ulcerated sores to which they exposed themselves “roses,” had drunk the water with which they had bathed those festering bodies, and had declared they had never drunk anything so tasty.

Settembrini pretended he was going to vomit. It was less the sheer physical repulsiveness of such scenes and ideas that turned his stomach, he said, than the monstrous insanity evident in such a conception of active charity. And pulling himself up straight and regaining his serene dignity, he spoke about modern, progressive forms of humanitarian nursing, the slow, steady victory over epidemic disease, and went on to contrast such horrors with the achievements of medical science, hygiene, and social reforms.

During the centuries he was talking about, Naphta responded, such decent bourgeois measures would have served neither side—would have been of no more use to the ill and suffering than to the healthy and happy, who had wanted to demonstrate their charity not so much out of compassion as out of the desire to save their own souls. Efficacious social reforms would have deprived the latter of the most important means of justification, and the former of their sanctified state. And so it had been in the interest of both parties to perpetuate poverty and illness, and that attitude had held as long as it had been possible to maintain a purely religious view of things.

A squalid view of things, Settembrini asserted, and he felt himself almost above combating such an attitude. For the notion of a “sanctified state” or what the engineer had called “Christian reverence for misery”—though the phrase was surely not his own—was a fraud based on deception, on misplaced feelings, on a psychological blunder. The sympathy that the healthy person felt for someone who was ill, which could intensify to the point of awe, since he was unable to imagine how he could ever bear such suffering himself—such sympathy was utterly exaggerated. The sick person had no right to it. It was based on a misperception, a failure of imagination, because the healthy person was attributing his own mode of experience to the sick person, making of him, so to speak, a healthy person who had to bear the torments of sickness—a totally erroneous idea. The sick person was just that, sick, both by nature and in his mode of experience. Illness battered its victim until they got along with one another: the senses were diminished, there were lapses in consciousness, a merciful self-narcosis set in—all means by which nature allowed the organism to find relief, to adapt mentally and morally to its condition, and which the healthy person naively forgot to take into account. A perfect example was this tubercular pack up here, with their frivolity, stupidity, depravity, their aversion to becoming healthy again. In short, if the sympathetic or awestruck healthy person were to become sick himself, to lose his health, he would soon see that illness is a state in and of itself, though certainly not an honorable one, and that he had been taking it all too seriously.