“My dear friend, you have the floor. I am only eager to make the acquaintance of the Great Unknown, the bringer of the Terror.”
“A perilous curiosity on your part, as the spokesman of a class of society which has acted as the standard-bearer of freedom—considering it is that very freedom that has dragged the world to the brink of destruction. Your goal is the democratic Imperium, the apotheosis of the principle of the national State in that of the universal, the World-State. And the emperor of this World-State? Your Utopia is monstrous—and yet, at this point, we find ourselves to a certain extent again on common ground. For your capitalistic world-republic is, in truth, transcendental in character; the World-State is the secular State transcended; and we unite in the faith that the final, perfected State, lying dim upon the far horizon, should correspond to man’s original, primitive perfection. Since the time of Gregory the Great, the founder of the State of God, the Church has always regarded it as her task to bring mankind back under the divine guidance. Gregory’s claim to temporal power was put forward not for its own sake, but rather because his delegated dictatorship was to be the means and the way to the goal of redemption—a transitional stage between the pagan State and the heavenly kingdom. You have spoken to your pupils here of the bloody deeds of the Church, her chastisements and her intolerance; very foolishly so, for it stands to reason that the zeal of the godly cannot be pacifistic in character—Gregory himself said: ‘Cursed be the man who holds back his sword from the shedding of blood.’ That power is evil we know. But if the kingdom is to come, then it is necessary that the dualism between good and evil, between power and the spirit, here and hereafter, must be for the time abrogated to make way for a single principle, which shall unify asceticism and domination. This is what I mean by the necessity for the Terror.”
“But the standard-bearer, the standard-bearer?”
“Do you still ask? Is your Manchester liberalism unaware of the existence of a school of economic thought which means the triumph of man over economics, and whose principles and aims precisely coincide with those of the kingdom of God? The Fathers of the Church called ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ pernicious words, and private property usurpation and robbery. They repudiated the idea of personal possessions, because, according to divine and natural law, the earth is common to all men, and brings forth her fruits for the common good. They taught that avarice, a consequence of the Fall, represents the rights of property and is the source of private ownership. They were humane enough, anti-commercial enough, to feel that all commercial activity was a danger to the soul of man and its salvation. They hated money and finance, and called the empire of capital fuel for the fires of hell. The fundamental economic principle that price is regulated by the operation of the law of supply and demand, they have always despised from the bottom of their hearts; and condemned taking advantage of chance as a cynical exploitation of a neighbour’s need. Even more nefarious, in their eyes, was the exploitation of time; the montrousness of receiving a premium for the passage of time—interest, in other words—and misusing to one’s own advantage and another’s disadvantage a universal and God-given dispensation.”
“Benissimo!” cried Hans Castorp, in his excitement availing himself of Herr Settembrini’s formula of assent. “The time—a universal, God-given dispensation! That is highly important.”
“Quite,” said Naphta. “Indeed, these humane spirits were revolted by the idea of the automatic increase of money; they regarded as usury every kind of interest-taking and speculation, and declared that every rich man was either a thief or the heir of a thief. They went further. Like Thomas Aquinas, they considered trade, pure and simple, buying and selling for profit, without altering or improving the product, a contemptible occupation. They were not inclined to place a very high value on labour in and for itself, as being an ethical, not a religious concern, and performed not in the service of God, but as a part of the business of living. This being the case, they demanded that the measure of profit or of public esteem should be in proportion to the actual labour expended, and accordingly it was not the tradesman or the industrialist, but the labourer and the tiller of the soil, who were honourable in their eyes. For they were in favour of making production dependent upon necessity, and held mass production in abhorrence. Now, then: after centuries of disfavour these principles and standards are being resurrected by the modern movement of communism. The similarity is complete, even to the claim for world-domination made by international labour as against international industry and finance; the world-proletariat, which is today asserting the ideals of the Civitas Dei in opposition to the discredited and decadent standards of the capitalistic bourgeoisie. The dictatorship of the proletariat, the politico-economic means of salvation demanded by our age, does not mean domination for its own sake and in perpetuity; but rather in the sense of a temporary abrogation, in the Sign of the Cross, of the contradiction between spirit and force; in the sense of overcoming the world by mastering it; in a transcendental, a transitional sense, in the sense of the
