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The Magic Mountain
Operationes Spirituales cont.
P529 An interesting passage here about the similarities between Loyola’s doctrines and those of Frederick the Great. I would quibble that Loyola was Basque and not Spanish. Naphta continues,
P532 ...what all, in his opinion, did not oppose asceticism and the kingdom of God! Not only our ties to family and homeland did so, but also those to health and life. Asceticism was even his basis for reproaching the humanist whenever he trumpeted peace and happiness; Naphta would belligerently accuse him to his face of love of the flesh... and love of physical comfort... call it utter bourgeois irreligion to ascribe the least value to life and health.
Then there was the great colloquy on health and sickness, which arose out of differences that became apparent one day, very close to Christmas...
Actually the dispute had started over Karen Karstedt... who had died recently... Naphta began to speak of pius excesses of charity witnessed in the Middle Ages...
P533 Settembrini... spoke about modern, progressive forms of humanitarian nursing...
P534 [Settembrini goes on to talk about illness,] ... The sick person was just that, sick, both by nature and in his mode of experience. Illness battered its victim until they got along with one another: the senses were diminished, there were lapses of consciousness, a merciful self-narcosis set in -- all means by which nature allowed the organism to find relief, to adapt mentally and morally to its condition, and which a healthy person naively forgot to take into account... [Ferge objects as this sounds like an insult to his pleural shock. Then Settembrini launches into a claim that madmen can be brought back to reality by, “confronting his fiddle-faddle with a pose of unrelenting reason.”]
...
P537 ...Naphta now went on to discuss... the general biases that induced humanists to honor health on principle and dishonor and belittle sickness whenever possible -- a position... that revealed a remarkable and almost praiseworthy self-abnegation on Herr Settembrini’s part, since he was himself ill. Such an attitude... arose from a regard and reverence for the body, which could only be justified if the body still existed in its original God-given state, rather than in a state of humiliation... For although created immortal, it had become subject to decay and abomination as part of the general impairment of nature brought about by Original Sin, was now mortal and corruptible, and should be regarded merely as a prison, the stocks in which the soul was entrapped, its sole purpose being to awaken within us a feeling of shame and confusion... as Saint Ignatius had put it. [Hans brings up Plotinus again and Settembrini demands he not confuse the two points of view.]
Naphta now proceeded to prove that the awe in which the Christian Middle Ages had held the suffering human body was derived from religious affirmation in the face of the afflictions of the flesh. For festering sores were not only conspicuous reminders of the body’s sunken state, but also, in reflecting the venomous corruption of the soul, they awakened a desire for edifying spiritual compensation; whereas the bloom of health was a deceptive phenomenon, an offense to the conscience that it was best to disavow by bowing low in profound humility before human frailty... Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? That was the voice of the Spirit, and it would be the voice of true humanity for all eternity.
P538 No, that was a benighted voice, in Herr Settembrini’s opinion... The voice of a world upon which the sun of reason and humanity had never risen. Yes indeed, his own body might be venomous, but he had kept his mind healthy and uninfected enough to defy Naphta’s priestley views concerning the body and to ridicule what he called the soul. He went on to celebrate the human body as the veritable temple of God, whereupon Naphta declared our stuff to be nothing more than a curtain between us and eternity, which resulted in Settembrini forbidding him ever to use the word “humanity” again -- and so on.
P538 [The subject of flogging comes up -- which again makes me think that Mann has Dostoevsky in mind to some extent,] ...It was not surprising that Herr Settembrini, invoking the dignity of man in sterling words, spoke out against the brutal practice... nor was it any more surprising... that Naphta spoke out in favor of the bastinado. According to him, it was absurd to jabber on about the dignity of man in this instance, for our true dignity was based in the Spirit and not the flesh, and since the human soul was only too inclined to suck its entire love of life from the body, the administration of pain to the body was a highly commendable means by which to spoil the soul’s desire for sensual pleasure and... drive it back out of the body into the spiritual realm, thereby restoring the latter’s dominion... Saint Elizabeth had been disciplined by her father confessor... until he drew blood, “transporting her soul,” as legend put it, “to the third choir of angels,” and she had herself laid the rod to an old woman who was too sleepy to make her confession. [Foucault would have made a beeline to a SF gay bathhouse named “The third choir of angels.” See HERE in my other, other blog.] Would anyone venture in all earnestness to declare as barbaric and inhumane the self-flagellation practiced among members of certain orders and sects, and in general by people of more profound capacities, in order that they might strengthen their own spiritual principles? ...
P540 ...Naphta asked... how else intractable criminals should be handled if not with stocks and cudgels... A humane prison was a half-measure, an aesthetic compromise, and although Herr Settembrini was a master of beautiful rhetoric, he understood nothing about aesthetics... the conception of human dignity that sought to ban corporal punishment had its roots, to hear Naphta tell it, in the liberal individualism of the era of bourgeois humanism, in the Enlightenment absolutism of the ego, which was about to atrophy and be replaced by a wave of newer, less namby-pamby social concepts, ideas of submission and obedience, of bridles and bonds, and since such things were not to be had without holy cruelty, flogging would thus be regarded with quite a different eye.
[They move on to the subject of cremation, which Settembrini approves of and Naphta doesn’t. Wehsal brings up torture. But they get nowhere with that so Hans brings up capital punishment. Settembrini argues against capital punishment, “basing his argument on scientific determinism.”]
P546 Whereupon “youth in search of light” [the phrase Settembrini has just used] was forced to watch as Naphta took each argument, one after the other, and wrung its neck. He ridiculed the philanthropist's reluctance to shed blood, his reverence for life, claimed that such a reverence for life belonged to only the most banal rubbers-and-umbrellas bourgeois periods, but that the moment history took a more passionate turn, the moment a single idea, something that transcended mere “security,” was at work, something supra-personal, something greater than the individual -- and since that alone was a state worthy of mankind, it was, on a higher plane, the normal state of affairs -- at that moment, then, individual life would always be sacrificed without further ado to that higher idea, and not only that, but individuals would also unhesitatingly and gladly risk their own lives for it. His good adversary’s philanthropy... was aimed at robbing life of all its difficult and deadly serious aspects; its goal was the castration of life, and the same went for the determinism of its so-called science. The truth was... that determinism could never abolish the concept of guilt -- indeed it could only add to its terrible gravity.
Recalling that this was written in the 1920s, with the sacrifices of the Great War in the recent past and with the ‘30s and ‘40s up next, it is hard to argue with Naphta here.
...
...The criminal was as imbued with guilt as he was with self. For he was what he was, and was neither able nor willing to be anything else -- and that was his guilt. Herr Naphta removed guilt and merit from the empirical world to the metaphysical. Our deeds, our actions were predetermined, of course, that was not where our freedom lay -- but in being. Man was as he wanted to be, and would never cease to want to be until his extermination. “For the life of him” he had gladly slain others, and so it was not too high a price to exact life from him. Let him die then, for he had satisfied the deepest lust of his heart.
The deepest lust?
The deepest.
...
P547 Settembrini responded with a subtle remark: “It seems some generalizations reflect on the person making them. You feel a desire to kill, do you?”
“That’s no business of yours. If I did, however, I would laugh right in the face of any ignorant humanitarian who tried to keep me on a diet of pap until I died in my bed. It is nonsense... for a murderer to outlive his victim. The two of them, eye to eye, are alone together in a way that two people are alone in only one other similar circumstance, the one receptive, the other active -- and they share a secret that will unite them forever. They belong together.”
Settembrini confessed coolly that he lacked the requisite organ for this murderous mysticism... He felt an insurmountable need for tidiness that kept him out of that realm where a reverence for human misery... reigned, not only in physical but also in a psychological sense, a realm where... virtue, reason, and health meant nothing, but where vice and illness were held in extraordinary honor.
Naphta agreed that virtue and health were not part of the religious condition. Much would be gained my making it clear that religion had absolutely nothing to do with reason and morality. For... religion had nothing to do with life. Life was based on conditions and principles that belonged in part to epistemology and in part to ethics -- the former being time, space, and causality; the latter, morality and reason. All such matters were not only foreign and of no significance to religion as such, but also inimical to it; for they were the constituents of life, or so-called health, which was to say, ultraphilistine, utter bourgeois existence -- to which the religious world was ordained to be the absolute opposite, indeed the very genius of opposition... There was a “bourgeoisiosity” of life, whose monumental genius was indisputable, a philistine majesty, which one might well consider worthy of respect, as long as one realized that ... it was the incarnation of irreligiosity.
This might be the place to put another link to Pirenne. One of his points I found most surprising was that the extreme, fundamentalist, forms of Protestantism and pre-Protestant heresy rose from the bourgeoisie. See Proto-Protestantism (Bourgeois asceticism threatens the Church in the 11th century) HERE; Cathars heresy HERE; John Wycliffe & the beguines (mysticism in the 14th century) HERE; Luther HERE. Though it was not clear to me how much this was the result of lay education (and starting with Luther, the printing-press) and how much it was a reaction against 'the "bourgeoisiosity” of life.' (I've nearly repeated myself in a very slightly different context. Last time I was talking about the City of God.)
P548 [Hans jumps in here,] ... the opposition between life and religion could be traced to that between time and eternity. Because progress occurred only within time; there was no progress in eternity, no politics or eloquence, either. There one laid one’s head back onto God... and closed one’s eyes...
[Naphta about Settembrini] ...The decisive factor of the humanist’s view of the world was that God and the Devil were two different persons or principles and that “life” was the bone of contention between them -- very much after the medieval model, by the way. In reality... they were one, were united in their opposition to life, to the bourgeoisity of life, to ethics, reason, virtue; they were the single religious principle that they represented together.
Again, I have to say Naphta makes a good point here. Also, I don’t think this was the first time I, for just an instant, thought “he” was going even further in saying that “they were one.” The Manichean heresy is one of the most pernicious in Catholic history, and yet if you don’t posit both a good and an evil power it seems that you are left with your monotheistic God being responsible for evil as well.
“What a revolting hodgepodge...” Settembrini cried. God and evil, the holy and the criminal all jumbled together, No judgement, no will, no capacity to reject what was vile. He wondered if Herr Naphta knew just what he was repudiating... by jumbling up God and the Devil and denying the ethical principle in the name of his depraved Holy Duality. He was repudiating... values, every standard of value. Fine -- good and evil did not exist, only a morally chaotic void. [This is what I was saying was the conclusion to be drawn from A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. Or very like] The individual, in all the dignity of his critical faculties, did not exist, just an all-devouring, all-leveling community, and a mystical submersion in it. The individual --
P549 How charming -- Herr Settembrini was back to calling himself an individualist. To be that... one needed to know the difference between morality and blessedness, which the gentleman, as a good illuminatus and monist, most certainly did not. Wherever life was stupidly regarded as an end in itself, with no questions asked about a meaning or purpose beyond it, what one found were social ethics, species ethics, vertebrate ethics, but not individualism -- that resided solely in the realm of the religious and mystical, in that so-called chaotic void. Just what was Herr Settembrini’s morality, what was its point? It was bound to life, and so merely utilitarian -- unheroic, miserly so. Its sole objective was for a person to grow old, rich, happy, and healthy -- period; he considered a philistine gospel of reason and work to be ethics. But as far as he, Naphta, was concerned, he once again took the liberty of calling that a shabby bourgeoisiosity of life.
This is why I think this is the ultimate book for a “Meaning of Life” book club. Plus, how often do you get to say or write “bourgeoisiosity?”
Settembrini begged for moderation here... because he found it intolerable that Herr Naphta kept talking about the “bourgeoisiosity of life” in such a... disdainful , aristocratic tone, as if the opposite -- and everyone knew what the opposite of life was -- was somehow more noble.
...Hans Castorp... his mind reeling... admitted haltingly that he had always imagined death wearing a starched Spanish ruff, or at least in some sort of semi-uniform with a high stiff collar, whereas life always wore a little, normal, modern collar. And then aghast... at the drunken dreaminess of his words, he assured them that was not what he had meant to say. But was it not true that there were people... whom one found it impossible to picture dead, precisely because they were so vulgar?... they seemed so fit for life, so good at it, that they would never die, as if they were unworthy of the consecration of death.
Funny that he denies his true opinion only to add something Settembrini would find even worse.
P550 [Settembrini,] ...”Fit for life,” had he said?... “Worthy of life” -- that was the term he should have used instead. And then his thoughts would order themselves in a true and beautiful manner. “Worthy of life -- and at once... one was reminded of the term “worthy of love,” which was so intimately related to the former that one could say that whatever was worthy of life was truly worthy of love. And joined together, the two terms -- “worthy of love” and “worthy of life” -- became what one called noble.
[Hans thinking,] ...Because say what one might, what one would... for example that illness was a higher level of life and so possessed a kind of solemnity -- this much was certain: illness meant an overemphasis on the physical, sent a person back to his own body, cast him back totally upon it, as it were, detracted from the worthiness and dignity of man to the point of annihilation by reducing man to mere body. Illness, therefore, was inhuman.
Illness was supremely human, Naphta immediately rebutted, because to be human was to be ill. Indeed, man was ill by nature, his illness was what made him human, and whoever sought to make him healthy and attempted to get him to make peace with nature, to “return to nature” (whereas he had never been natural), that whole pack of Rousseauian prophets -- regenerators, vegetarians, fresh-air-freaks, sunbath apostles, and so forth -- wanted nothing more than to dehumanize man and turn him into an animal. Humanity? Nobility? The Spirit was what distinguished man -- a creature set very much apart from nature, with feelings very much contrary to nature -- from the rest of organic life. Therefore, the dignity and nobility of man was based in the Spirit, in illness. In a word, the more ill a man was the more highly human he was, and the genius of illness was more human than that of health. It was astonishing how someone who played the philanthropist could close his eyes to such basic truths of humanity. Herr Settembrini was forever going on about progress. As if progress, to the extent such a thing existed, was not due solely to illness. As if those who were healthy had not always lived from the achievements of illness. There had always been people who had willingly entered into illness and madness in order to win knowledge for mankind -- and knowledge, having been wrested from madness, became health and, once obtained by heroic sacrifice, its possession and use were no longer conditioned by illness and madness. That was the true death on the cross.
One can imagine Michel Foucault sitting bolt upright upon reading this passage. But I suppose he is talking about the Christian “truth” here.[
P551 “Aha,” Hans Castorp said to himself, “you improper Jesuit with your permutations and interpretations of the Crucifixion. It’s clear enough why you did not become [my translation says “became”] a priest, a handsome Jesuit with a little moist spot! Well, lion, roar,” he thought, turning toward Herr Settembrini. And “roar” he did, declaring everything Naphta had said to be chicanery, humbug, confusion. “Admit it... your Spirit is illness... Go ahead and explain how illness and death are noble, but health and life are sordid... “ And like a knight entering the lists, he championed the nobility of health and life, the nobility that had been granted by nature and did not need to fear Spirit. “Form!” he said. And Naphta grandiloquently responded, “Logos!” But he who would not hear of the logos, said, “Reason!” And the man of the logos defended “Passion!” Confusion reigned... But there was no clarity, no order, not even of a dualistic and militant sort; for it was all not only contradictory, but... the disputants not only contradicted one another, but also themselves... [Hans wonders,] how did Naphta actually achieve such bloody, unconditional certainty, since he admitted he did not believe in pure knowledge as such, in unbiased research, in short, not even in truth, in objective, scientific truth... In that regard, it was Herr Settembrini who was pious and strict, and Naphta who was lax and slovenly, referring truth back to man and declaring that whatever profited man was true. To make truth that dependent on man’s own interests -- was that not itself philistine utilitarianism, a bourgeoisisity of life? So that you could not call it ironclad objectivity, there was more freedom and subjectivity to it than Leo Naphta would have been willing to admit -- it was in its own way just as “political” as Herr Settembrini’s didactic statement that freedom was the law of brotherly love. And that clearly meant that his freedom, like Naphta’s truth, was tied to just one thing: man. But that made it decidedly more devout than free -- yet another juxtaposition of terms that tended to slip away when you began defining things... Herr Settembrini was afraid of the “absolute Spirit,” wanted to restrict “spirit” to democratic progress, and nothing else -- was horrified by militant Naphta’s religious licentiousness, which made a jumble of God and the Devil, the holy and the criminal, genius and illness, which recognized no values, no judgements of reason, no will. Who, then, was actually free, and who devout? What constituted man’s true state and condition: obliteration in all-devouring, all-leveling community, which was a simultaneously voluptuous and ascetic act; or “critical subjectivity,” where bombast and strict bourgeois virtue were at loggerheads? ... there was no lack of inner contradictions, making it all extraordinarily difficult for a civilian to exercise responsibility, not merely to decide between opposites, but also to keep them apart as neat, separate specimens -- until a civilian was sorely tempted to plunge headlong into Naphta’s “morally chaotic void.” ...and Hans Castorp thought he saw that the disputants would have been less embittered, if during their dispute each had not been the harasser of his own soul.
...
P554 ...Hans Castorp... retired to his balcony -- his ears full of the hubbub and alarums of two armies, one from Jerusalem, the other from Babylon, advancing under the dos banderas and joining now in the confused tumult of battle.
I was working out at the gym and thinking about health and Spirit when an ad for one of 24 Hour Fitness’s special programs came over the speakers. The slogan for the program was, “Love your body. Love your life.” I thought I could hear Naphta screaming in his grave.
And HERE is where Pirenne discusses the Cluniac reforms of the 10th century that sound very like the religious position Naphta is advocating.
Next up, finally, "Snow."
Jump to Next: The Magic Mountain - Snow
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