Here Hans Castorp put in his word. With the courage of simplicity he mixed in the debate, and, gazing into space, delivered himself thus: “Devotion, retirement—there is something in it, it sounds reasonable. We practise a pretty high degree of retirement from the world, we up here. No doubt about it. Five thousand feet up, we lie in these excellent chairs of ours, contemplating the world and all that therein is, and having our thoughts about it. The more I think of it, the surer I am that the bed of repose—by which I mean my deck-chair, of course—has given me more food for thought in these ten months than the mill down in the flat-land in all the years before. There’s simply no denying it.”
Settembrini looked at him, a melancholy gleam in his dark eye. “Engineer!” he said, restrainingly. He took Hans Castorp’s arm and drew him a little aside, as though to speak to him in private “How often have I told you that one must realize what one is and think accordingly! Never mind the propositions. Our Western heritage is reason—reason, analysis, action, progress: these, and not the slothful bed of monkish tradition!”
Naphta had been listening. He turned his head to say, “Monkish tradition! As if we did not owe to the monks the culture of the soil of all Europe! As if it were not due to them that Germany, France and Italy yield us corn and wine and fruit today, instead of being covered with primeval forest and swamp! The monks, my dear sir were hard workers—”
“Ebbè! Well, then!”
“Permit me. The labour of these religious was neither an end in itself—that is to say, it was not a narcotic—nor was its purpose to further the progress of the world, or to reap commercial advantage. It was pure penitential discipline, a part of the technique of asceticism, the means of salvation. It mortified the senses, it was a safeguard against the wiles of the flesh. And as such, permit me to point out, it was essentially unsocial. It was pure, unsullied religious egoism.”
“I am much indebted to you for the elucidation, and rejoice to see that the blessings of labour can justify themselves, even against the will of man.”
“Certainly against his intentions, at least. What I am calling your attention to is nothing less than the distinction between the utilitarian and the humane.”
“And what I am calling your attention to is the fact, which I observe with indignation, that you are still dividing the world up into opposing factions.”
“I grieve to have incurred your displeasure. Yet it is needful to make distinctions, and to preserve the conception of the Homo Dei, free from contaminating constituents. It was you Italians that invented banking and exchange, which may God forgive you! But the English invented the economic social theory, and the genius of humanity can never forgive them that.”
“Ah, the genius of humanity was alive in that island’s great economic thinkers too!—You wanted to say something Engineer?”
Hans Castorp demurred—yet said something anyhow, Naphta as well as Settembrini listening with a certain suspense: “From what you say, Herr Naphta, you must sympathize with my cousin’s profession, and understand his impatience to be at it. As for me I am an out-and-out civilian, my cousin often reproaches me with it. I have never seen service; I am a child of peace, pure and simple, and have even sometimes thought of becoming a clergyman—ask my cousin if I haven’t said as much to him many a time! But for all that, and aside from my personal inclinations—or even, perhaps, not altogether aside from them—I have some understanding and sympathy for a military life. It has such an infernally serious side to it, sort of ascetic, as you say—that was the expression you used, wasn’t it? The military always has to reckon on coming to grip with death, just as the clergy has. That is why there is so much discipline and decorum and regularity in the army, so much ‘Spanish etiquette,’ if I may say so; and it makes no great difference whether one wears a uniform collar or a starched ruff, the main thing is the asceticism, as you so beautifully said.—I don’t know if I’ve succeeded in making my train of thought quite—”
“Oh, quite,” said Naphta, and flung a glance at Settembrini, who was twirling his cane and looking up at the sky.
“And that,” went on Hans Castorp, “is why I thought you must have great sympathy with the feelings of my cousin Ziemssen. I am not thinking of ‘Church and King’ and suchlike associations of ideas, that a lot of perfectly well-meaning and conventional people stand for. What I mean is that service in the army—‘service’ is the right word—isn’t performed for commercial advantage, nor for the sake of the economic doctrine of society, as you call it—and that must be the reason why the English have such a small army, a few for India, and a few at home for reviews—”
“It is useless for you to go on, Engineer,” Settembrini interrupted him. “The soldier’s existence—I say this without intending the slightest offence to Lieutenant Ziemssen—cannot be cited in the argument, for the reason that, as an existence, it is purely formal—in and for itself entirely without content. Its typical representative is the infantry soldier, who hires himself out for this or that campaign. Take the soldiers of the Spanish Counter-Reformation, for instance, or of the various revolutionary armies, the Napoleonic or Garibaldian—or take the Prussian. I will be ready to talk about the soldier when I know what he is fighting for.”
“But that he does fight,” rejoined Naphta, “remains the distinctive feature of his existence as a soldier.
