The listeners heaved each a deep sigh—they had been holding their breaths during Herr Settembrini’s great replication. Hans Castorp did not let himself go altogether, yet could not refrain from slapping the edge of the table with his hand. “Magnificent,” he said, between clenched teeth. Joachim too evinced lively approval, despite the word Herr Settembrini had let fall about Prussianism. Both of them turned toward the antagonist who had just suffered this crushing rebuff—Hans Castorp with such eagerness that he fell unconsciously into the very posture he had taken at the pig-drawing, his elbows on the table and his chin in his palm, and peered in suspense into Herr Naphta’s face.
And Naphta sat there, tense and motionless, his lean hands in his lap. He said: “I try to introduce a little logic into the debate, and you answer me with lofty sentiments. I was already tolerably well aware that what is called liberalism—individualism the humanistic conception of citizenship—was the product of the Renaissance. But the fact leaves me entirely cold, realizing as I do that your great heroic age is a thing of the past its ideals defunct, or at least lying at their latest gasp, while the feet of those who will deal them the coup de grâce are already before the door. You call yourself, if I am not mistaken, a revolutionist. But you err in holding that future revolutions will issue in freedom. In the past five hundred years, the principle of freedom has outlived its usefulness. An educational system which still conceives itself as a child of the age of enlightenment, with criticism as its chosen medium of instruction, the liberation and cult of the ego the solvent of forms of life which are absolutely fixed—such a system may still, for a time, reap an empty rhetorical advantage; but its reactionary character is, to the initiated, clear beyond any doubt. All educational organizations worthy of the name have always recognized what must be the ultimate and significant principle of pedagogy: namely the absolute mandate, the iron bond, discipline, sacrifice, the renunciation of the ego, the curbing of the personality. And lastly, it is an unloving miscomprehension of youth to believe that it finds its pleasure in freedom: its deepest pleasure lies in obedience.”
Joachim sat up straight. Hans Castorp reddened. Herr Settembrini excitedly twisted his fine moustache.
“No,” Naphta went on. “Liberation and development of the individual are not the key to our age, they are not what our age demands. What it needs, what it wrestles after, what it will create—is Terror.”
He uttered the last word lower than the rest; without a motion of his body. Only his eyeglasses suddenly flashed. All three of them, as they heard it, jumped, even Herr Settembrini, who, however, promptly collected himself and smiled.
“And may one ask,” he queried, “whom, or what—you see I am all question, I ask even how to ask—whom, or what you envisage as the bringer of this—this—I repeat the word with some unwillingness—this Terror?”
Naphta sat motionless, flashing like a drawn blade. He said: “I am at your service. I believe I do not err in assuming our agreement in the conception of an original ideal state of man, a condition without government and without force, an unmediated condition as the child of God, in which there was neither lordship nor service, neither law nor penalty, nor sin nor relation after the flesh; no distinction of classes, no work, no property: nothing but equality, brotherhood, and moral perfectitude.”
“Very good. I agree,” declared Settembrini. “I agree with everything except the relations after the flesh, which obviously must at all times have subsisted, since man is a highly developed vertebrate, and, like other creatures of his kind—”
“As you like. I am merely stating our fundamental agreement with respect to the original, paradisial state of man, his freedom from law, and his unmediated relation with God, which state was lost to him by his fall. I believe we may go side by side for another few steps of the way: in that we both explain the State as a social contract, taking account of the Fall and entered into as a safeguard against evil, and that we both see in it the origin of sovereign power—”
“Benissimo!” cried Settembrini. “Social contract—why, that is Enlightenment, that is Rousseau. I had no idea—”
“One moment, pray. We part company here. All power and all control was originally vested in the people, who made it over, together with the right to make laws, to their princes. But from this your school deduces in the first instance the right of the people to revolt from the monarchy. Whereas we, on the contrary—”
“We?” thought Hans Castorp, breathlessly. “Who are ‘we’? I must certainly ask Settembrini afterwards, whom he means by ‘we.’ ”
“We, for our part,” Naphta was saying, “perhaps no less revolutionary than you, have consistently deduced the supremacy of the Church over the secular power. The temporal nature of the power of the State is, as it were, written on its forehead; but even if it were not, it would be enough to point to the historical fact that its authority goes back to the will of the people, whereas that of the Church rests upon the divine sanction, to establish its character as a device which, if not precisely contrived by the power of evil, is nevertheless a faulty and inadequate makeshift.”
“The State, my dear sir—”
“I am acquainted with your views on the subject of the national State. As your Virgil has it: ‘Fatherland-love conquers all, and hunger
