Herr Settembrini thanked him for jogging his memory. The figure of the monk Ilsan in the Rosengarten he did indeed find refreshing by comparison with this much-lauded aristocracy of the grave. He, the speaker, was no friend to the German Reformation; but they would find him ever ready to defend whatever of democratic individualism there was in its teaching, against any and every clerical and feudal craving for dominion over the individual.
“Aha!” cried Naphta. So Herr Settembrini would condemn the Church for lack of democracy, for being wanting in a sense of the value of human personality? But what of the humane freedom from prejudice evinced by canonical law? For whereas Roman law made the possession of legal rights dependent upon citizenship, and Germanic law upon individual freedom and membership in the tribe, ecclesiastical law, orthodoxy, was alone in divorcing legal rights from either national or social considerations, and asserting that slaves, serfs, and prisoners of war were all capable of making wills and inheriting property.
Settembrini bitingly remarked that he might mention, as not entirely irrelevant in this connection, the so-called “canonical portion,” which subtracted a substantial sum from every testamentary bequest. And he spoke of priestly demagoguery, which began to vent its thirst for power in exaggerated solicitude for the underdog, when the top dog would none of it. The Church, he asserted, cared more about the quantity of souls she got hold of than their quality—which certainly reflected upon her pretensions to spiritual refinement.
So the Church lacked refinement? Herr Settembrini’s attention was invited to the inexorable aristocratism which underlay the idea that shame could be inherited: the passing on of guilt to the—democratically considered—innocent descendants; for example, the illegitimacy and lifelong pollution of natural children. But the Italian bade him be silent: in the first place, because his human feelings rose up in arms against Naphta’s words, and in the second, because he had had enough of such quibbles, and saw in the shifts of his opponent’s apologetics only the same old infamous and devilish cult of nihilism, which wanted to be called Spirit, and found so legitimate, so sacrosanct the admittedly existent hatred of the ascetic principle.
But here Naphta begged to be forgiven for laughing outright. The nihilism or the Church! The nihilism of the most realistic system of government in the history of the world! Herr Settembrini, then, had never been touched by a breath of that ironic humanity which made constant concession to the world and the flesh, cleverly veiling the letter and letting the spirit rule, not to put too sore a constraint on nature? He had never heard of the ecclesiastical conception of indulgence, under which was to be classified one of the sacraments of the Church—namely, marriage, not in itself an absolute good, like the other sacraments, but only a protection against sin, countenanced in order to set bounds to sensual desire; that the ascetic principle, the ideal of complete chastity, might be upheld, without at the same time opposing an unpolitic harshness to the flesh?
Herr Settembrini, of course, could not refrain from protesting against this hideous conception of “policy”; against the gesture of a shrewd and sinister complaisance, made by the “Spirit”—or what called itself so—against the imaginary guilt of its opposite, which it pretended to deal with in a “politic” sense, but which in reality stood in no need of the pernicious indulgence it proffered; against the accursed dualism of a conception which bedevilled the universe—that is to say, life—as well as life’s dark opposite, the Spirit—for if life was evil, the Spirit, as pure negation, must be so too. And he broke a lance in defence of the blamelessness of sensual gratification—hearing which, Hans Castorp could not but think of the humanistic cuddy under the roof, with its standing desk, rush-bottomed chairs, and water-bottle. Naphta asserted that sensual gratification was never blameless—nature, he said, always had a bad conscience in respect of the spiritual. The ecclesiastical policy of indulgence practised by the Spirit he designated as “Love”—this to refute the nihilism of the ascetic principle. Hans Castorp felt how very odd indeed the word sounded in the mouth of sharp, skinny little Naphta.
So it went on—we know already how it went, and so did Hans Castorp. We have listened, as he did, for a little while, in order to learn how such a peripatetic passage-at-arms fares, in what way it is blown upon, by the presence of a personality. It seemed as though a secret impulse to animadvert upon the presence of Peeperkorn quenched the leaping spark of wit, and
