Oh, so he demanded that the unhappy victim of social maladjustment be convinced of his own sinfulness, and tread in full conviction the path to the scaffold?
“Quite. The evildoer is filled with his guilt as with himself. For he is as he is, and can and will not be otherwise—and therein lies his guilt.”
Naphta shifted the ground of the discussion from the empiric to the metaphysical. He went on to say that in behaviour, in action, determinism did indeed rule; there was no freedom of choice. But in being, the man is as he has wished to be, and as, until his last breath, he has never ceased to wish to be. He has revelled in slaying, and does not pay too dear in being slain. Let him die, then, for he has gratified his heart’s deepest desire.
“Deepest desire?”
“Deepest desire.”
They all gritted their teeth. Hans Castorp gave a little cough, Wehsal set his jaw awry. Herr Ferge breathed a sigh, Settembrini shrewdly remarked: “There is a kind of generalization that has a distinctly personal cast. Have you ever had a desire to commit murder?”
“That is no concern of yours. But if I had, I should laugh in the face of any ignorant humanitarianism that tried to feed me on skilly till I died a natural death. It is absurd for the murderer to outlive the murdered. They two, alone together, as two beings are together in only one other human relationship, have, like them, the one acting, the other suffering him, shared a secret that binds them forever together. They belong to each other.”
Settembrini said frigidly that he lacked the brains necessary to the understanding of this death-and-murder mysticism—and he really didn’t miss them. No offence intended; Herr Naphta’s religious gift did undoubtedly far surpass his own, but he protested that he was not envious. His own nature had an unconquerable craving for fresh air; it kept him somewhat aloof from a sphere where reverence—and not merely the unthinking reverence of youth—was paid to suffering, and that in a spiritual as well as a physical sense. In that sphere, it was plain, virtue, reason, and healthiness counted for nothing, vice and disease were honoured in a wondrous way.
Naphta concurred. He said that being virtuous and healthy did not, in fact, constitute being in a state of religion at all. It would clear the air to have it plainly stated that religion had nothing to do with reason and morality.
“For,” he added, “it has nothing to do with life. Life is based on conditions and built up on foundations which are partly the result of experience, and partly belong to the domain of ethics. We call the first kind time, space, and causality; the second, morality and reason. But one and all of these are not only foreign to, utterly a matter of indifference to the nature of religion; they are even hostile to it. For they are precisely what make up life—the so-called normal life, which is to say, arch Philistinism, ultra-bourgeoisiedom, the absolute antithesis of which, the very genius of antithesis to which, is the life of religion.”
Naphta went on to say that he would not deny to the other sphere the possibility of genius. There was much to admire in the monumental respectability, the majestic Philistinism of the middle-class consciousness. But one must never forget that as it stood, straddle-legged, firmly planted on earth, hands behind the back, chest well out, it was the embodiment of irreligion.
Hans Castorp, like a schoolboy, put up his hand. He wished, he said, not to offend either side. But since they were talking about progress, and thus, to a certain extent also, about politics, and the republic of eloquence and the civilization of the educated Occident, he might say that it seemed to him the difference—or, if Herr Naphta insisted, the antithesis—between life and religion went back to that between time and eternity. Only in time was there progress; in eternity there was none, nor any politics or eloquence either. There, so to speak, one laid one’s head back in God, and closed one’s eyes. And that was the difference between religion and morality—he was aware that he had put it very badly.
The way he put it, Settembrini remarked, naive as it was, was less objectionable than his fear of giving offence, his inclination to give ground to the Devil.
Oh, as far as the Devil was concerned, they two had talked about him aforetime, hadn’t they? “O Satana, O ribellione.” But which devil was it he had been giving ground to just now? Was it Carducci’s one—rebellion, activity, critical spirit—or was it the other? It was pretty dangerous having a devil on either hand, like this; how in the Devil’s name should we get out of it?
That, Naphta said, was no proper description of the state of affairs as Herr Settembrini looked at them. For the distinctive feature of his cosmos was that he made God and the Devil two distinct persons or principles, with “life” as a bone of contention between them—which, by the by, was just the way the Middle Ages had envisaged them. But in reality, God and the Devil were at one in being opposed to life, to bourgeoisiedom, reason and virtue, since they together represented the religious principle.
“What a disgusting hodgepodge—che guazzabuglio proprio stomachevole!” Good and evil, sanctification and criminal conduct, all mixed up together! Without judgment! Without direction! Without the possibility of repudiating what was vile!
Did Herr Naphta realize what it was he denied and disavowed in the presence of youth, when he flung God and the Devil together and in the name of this mad two-in-oneness refused to admit the existence of an ethical principle? He denied every standard of values, he denied goodness! Horrible!—Very well, then there existed neither good nor evil, nothing but a morally chaotic All! There was not even the individual in possession of a critical faculty—there was
