Meanwhile, however, his health suffered; less, indeed, through the severity of the noviciate, which was not lacking in physical recreation, than from within. The subtlety and acumen characteristic of the educational system of which he was now the object met his own natural tendencies half-way. He spent all his days and a good share of his nights in intellectual exercises, in searchings of the conscience, in contemplation, in introspection, into which he flung himself with such a passion of contentiousness as to involve him in a thousand difficulties, contradictions, and controversies. He was the despair—if at the same time the greatest hope—of his tutors, whom he daily pushed to the limits of their endurance by his raging dialectic and the subtility of his mental processes. “A
d hœc quid tu?”
he would ask, the glasses of his spectacles flashing. And the cornered Father could only admonish him to pray for a tranquil spirit—”
ut in aliquem gradum quietis in anima perveniat.”
This tranquillity, when achieved, consisted of a complete atrophy of the personality, a state of insensibility in which the individual became a lifeless tool; it was a veritable “graveyard peace,” the uncanny outward signs of which Brother Naphta could see on the empty, staring faces of those about him, but to which he would never attain, even by the route of physical decay.
It spoke for the intellectual fibre of those in authority over him that his delays and drawbacks had no effect on his standing. At the end of his two years’ noviciate, the Pater Provincial himself sent for him, and after the interview sanctioned his admission into the Society. The young scholastic, having taken the four lowest orders of doorkeeper, acolyte, lector, and exorcizor, and also the “simple” vows, was now definitely a member of the Society, and set out for Falkenberg, the Jesuit college in Holland, to begin his theological studies.
He was then twenty years old. At the end of three years, the unfavourable climate and the continued mental strain had so combined to aggravate his hereditary complaint that a longer stay would have endangered his life. His superiors were alarmed by a hæmorrhage; he hovered for weeks between life and death, when they hurried him, barely convalescent, back whence he had come. In the institution where he had been a pupil he found occupation as prefect and supervisor of the boarders, and teacher of the humanities and philosophy. Such an interval was in any case prescribed for the students of the Society; but it usually lasted only a few years, after which one returned to the college to take up again the seven years’ course of study and carry it to its conclusion. This, however, it was not granted Brother Naphta to do. He continued ailing; doctor and superior decided that it was best for him to serve his order here among the pupils, in the good country air, with plenty of outdoor occupation on the farm. He took indeed the first of the higher orders, and won therewith the right to chant the Epistle on Sundays at mass—a right, however, which he never exercised, first because he was entirely unmusical, and second because of his weak chest, which made his voice break and unfitted it for singing. He never got further than being subdeacon—not even to diaconate, much less to priesthood. The hæmorrhages recurred, the fever persisted, and he had finally come to the mountains for an extended cure at the Society’s expense. This was now in its sixth year, and gradually coming to be no longer so much a cure as a fixed condition of existence, a residence for life in rarefied atmosphere, coloured by some activity as Latin master in the Davos gymnasium for slightly tubercular boys.
All this, in much greater detail, Hans Castorp learned in the course of visits to Naphta’s silken cell, either alone or in company with his table-mates Ferge and Wehsal, whom he had introduced there; or else when he met Naphta out on a walk, and strolled back to the Dorf in his company. He learned it as occasion offered, bit by bit, but also in the form of continuous narrative; and found it all highly extraordinary. Not only so, but he incited Ferge and Wehsal to find it the same, which they accordingly did. The former, indeed, all the while protested that he was just a plain man, and this high-flown stuff utterly beyond him, his experience with the pleura-shock having been the sole event in his life to raise it above the most humdrum sphere. Wehsal, however, obviously enjoyed this narrative of a man’s rise to success from humble and oppressed beginnings—and in any case there was no ground in it for arrogance, since the good fortune seemed dwindling away again in the prevailing fleshly infirmity. Hans Castorp, for his part, regretted the reverse in Naphta’s affairs, thinking with pride and concern of the ambitious Joachim, who with a heroic effort had burst through the tough web of the Rhadamanthine rhetoric and flown to the colours, where his cousin’s fancy painted him clinging to the standard with three fingers upraised in the oath of fealty. To such a standard had Naphta too sworn faith, he too had been received beneath its folds: this had been the very figure he had employed when explaining his Society to Hans Castorp. But obviously, with his deviations and combinations, he was less true to his oath than Joachim to his. Hans Castorp, listening to the future or
ci-devant
Jesuit, felt himself strengthened in his views as a civilian and child of peace, while realizing that this man and Joachim would each find something satisfying in the calling of the other and recognize its likeness with his own. For the one was as military as the other, and both in every sense of the word; both being ascetic, both hierarchical, both bound to strict obedience and “Spanish etiquette.” This last in particular played a great rôle in Naphta’s society, originating as it did in Spain. Its exercises, which were a sort of pendant to the army regulations issued later by the Prussian Frederick to his infantry, were first written in the Spanish language, Naphta often making use of Spanish phrases in his narrative and descriptions. Thus he would speak of the “
dos banderas
“—the two standards—the Satanic and the celestial, beneath which the armies gathered for the great struggle: the one near Jerusalem, where Christ was the “
capitán general
” of all the faithful, the other on the plains of Babylon, of which the “
caudillo”
or chieftain was Lucifer. And had not the establishment of the Morning Star been, precisely, a military academy, the pupils of which were drilled by divisions in military and spiritual decorum, a mingling, so to speak, of stand-up collar and Spanish ruff? And ideas of rank and preferment, which played such a brilliant part in Joachim’s profession—how plainly, Hans Castorp thought, were they visible in that other society, wherein Naphta, alas, by reason of his illness, had been prevented from making further headway! By his account, the Society was exclusively composed of officers on fire with zeal, moved by the single thought of distinguishing themselves
(insignis esse
, in Latin). And these, according to the teaching of their founder and first general, the Spanish Loyola, performed a far more splendid service than any could who were guided merely by their normal reason. For theirs was a work of supererogation
(ex
supererogatione)
in that they not only combated the rebellion of the flesh
(rebellio
carnis)
, which after all was incumbent upon any average healthy human reason to do, but were hostile to even an inclination toward the things of the sense, toward love of self and love of worldly things, even where these had not been directly forbidden. For it was better and more honourable to assail the foe
(agere contra)
, that is, to attack, than merely to defend oneself (r
esistere)
. To weaken and break the foe—those were the instructions in the service-book; and here again, its author, the Spanish Loyola, was of one mind with Joachim’s
capitan general
, the Prussian Frederick, with his motto of “Attack, attack! Keep on their heels! At
taquez donc toujours!”
But what Naphta’s and Joachim’s worlds had most of all in common was their attitude towards the shedding of blood, their axiom that one must not hold back one’s hand. Therein, as worlds, as orders, as states of society, they were in stern accord. The child of peace would listen with avidity to Naphta’s stories of the warlike monks of the Middle Ages, who, ascetic to the point of physical exhaustion, and filled with a ghostly lust of power, had been unsparing in bloodshed to the end of establishing the kingdom of God and its supernal overlordship; of the warlike Templars, who had held it of far greater worth to die in battle with the infidel than in their beds, and no crime but the highest glory, to kill or be killed for Christ’s sake. Luckily, Settembrini had not been present at that conversation. He continued to fill the rôle of organ-grinder, and sang the praises of peace to harp and psaltery, but there was always the holy war against Vienna, to which he never said nay, though Naphta visited his foible with scorn and contempt, and when the Italian was glowing with passionate feeling, would lead the bourgeoisie of all Christendom into the field against him, swearing that every country, or else no country at all, was his fatherland, and repeating with cutting effect the phrase of a general of the Society, named Nickel, according to which our love of country was “a plague, and the certain death of Christian love.”
It was, of course, his ascetic ideal that made Naphta call patriotism a scourge—and what all did he not comprehend under the word, what all, according to him, did not run counter to the ascetic ideal and the kingdom of God. For not alone attachment to home and family, but even clinging to life and health were so set down, he made it a reproach to the humanist that the latter sang the praises of peace and happiness quarrelsomely accused him of love of the flesh
(amor carnalis)
and dependence upon bodily comfort
(commodorum corporis)
, and told him to his face that it was the worst sort of bourgeois irreligiosity to ascribe to health or life itself any importance whatsoever.
That was in the course of the great disputation on sickness and health, which one day, close on Christmas, arose out of certain differences they had during a snowy walk to the Platz and back. They all took part Settembrini, Naphta, Hans Castorp, Ferge and Wehsal—one and all slightly feverish, at once nervously stimulated and physically lethargic from walking and talking in the severe frost, all subject to fits of shivering, and—whether principals in the argument, like Settembrini and Naphta, or for the most part receptive, like the others, contributing only short ejaculations from time to time—all, without exception, so utterly absorbed that they stopped several times by the way, in a disorderly, gesticulating knot, blocking the path of the passersby, who had to describe a circle to get round them. People even paused and listened in astonishment to their extravagance.
The discussion had grown out of a reference somebody made to Karen Karstedt, poor Karen with the open finger-ends, whose death had lately occurred. Hans Castorp had heard nothing of her sudden turn for the worse and final exit, else he would gladly have assisted at the last rites, as a comradely attention, if not simply out of his confessed liking for funerals. But the local practice of discretion had prevented him from hearing of it until too late. Karen had gone to take up the horizontal for good, in the garden of the Cupid with the crooked snow-cap.
Requiem œternam
. He dedicated a few friendly words to her memory, interrupted by Herr Settembrini, who began making game of his pupil’s charitable activities, his visits to Leila Gerngross, Rotbein the business man, the “overfilled” Frau Zimmermann, the braggart son of Tous-lesdeux, and the afflicted Natalie von Mallinckrodt. He censured Hans Castorp in retrospect for paying tribute in costly flowers to that dismal, ridiculous crew; and Hans Castorp replied that with the temporary exception of Frau von Mallinckrodt and the boy Teddy, the recipients of his attentions had now in all seriousness died—to which Herr Settembrini retorted by asking if that made them any more respectable. Well, after all, Hans Castorp responded, wasn’t there such a thing as Christian reverence before suffering? Before Settembrini could put him down, Naphta interposed, and began to speak of the devout excesses manifested by pious souls in the Middle Ages, astounding cases of fanatic devotion and ecstasy in the care of the sick: kings’ daughters kissing the stinking wounds of lepers, voluntarily exposing themselves to contagion and calling the ulcers they received their “roses”; or drinking the water that had been used for the cleansing of abscesses, and vowing that nothing had ever tasted so good.
Settembrini made as though he would vomit. It was not so much, he said, the physically disgusting element in these tales that turned his stomach as the monstrous lunacy which betrayed itself in such a conception of the love of humanity. Then, recovering his poise and good humour, he drew himself up and held forth upon the recent progress of humanitarian ideals, the triumphant forcing back of epidemic disease, upon hygiene and social reform; he contrasted the horrors of pestilence with the feats of modern medical science.
All these, Naphta responded, were very honest bourgeois achievements; but they would have done more harm than good in the centuries under discussion. They would have profited neither one side nor the other; the ailing and wretched as little as the strong and prosperous, these latter not having been piteous for pity’s sake, but for the salvation of their own souls. Successful social reform would have robbed them of their necessary justification, as it would the wretched of their sanctified state. The persistence of poverty and sickness had been in the interest of both parties, and the position could be sustained just so long as it was possible to hold to the purely religious point of view.
“A filthy point of view,” Settembrini declared. A position the stupidity of which he felt himself above combating. This talk of the sanctified lot of the poor and wretched—yes, and what the Engineer, in his simplicity, had said about the Christian reverence due to suffering—was simply gammon, resting as it did on a misconception, on mistaken sympathy, on erroneous psychology. The pity the well person felt for the sick—a pity that almost amounted to awe, because the well person could not imagine how he himself could possibly bear such suffering—was very greatly exaggerated. The sick person had no real right to it. It was, in fact, the result of an error in thinking, a sort of hallucination; in that the well man attributed to the sick his own emotional equipment, and imagined that the sick man was, as it were, a well man who had to bear the agonies of a sick one—than which nothing was further from the truth. For the sick man was—precisely that, a sick man: with the nature and modified reactions of his state. Illness so adjusted its man that it and he could come to terms; there were sensory appeasements, short circuits, a merciful narcosis; nature came to the rescue with measures of spiritual and moral adaptation and relief, which the sound person naïvely failed to take into account. There could be no better illustration than the case of all this tuberculous crew up here, with their reckless folly, light-headedness and loose morals, and their total lack of desire for health. In short, let the sound man with all his respect for illness once fall ill himself, and he would soon see that being ill is a state of being in itself—no very honourable one either—and that he had been taking it a good deal too seriously.