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The Magic Mountain
The City of God and Evil Deliverance
P463 He had a special term for this responsible preoccupation with his thoughts as he sat at his picturesque, secluded spot: he called it “playing king” [regieren] -- a childish term taken from the games of his boyhood, and by it he meant that this was a kind of entertainment that he loved, although with it came fear, dizziness, and all sorts of heart palpitations that made his face flush even hotter. And he found it not unfitting that the strain of all this required him to prop his chin -- and the old method seemed perfectly appropriate to the dignity he felt when “playing king” and gazing at that hovering sublime image.
“Homo Dei” [human god] -- that had been ugly Naphta’s term for the sublime image when he was defending it against English social theory. Was it any wonder, then, that Hans Castorp, given his civilian sense of responsibility and interest in “playing king,” felt that he and Joachim were obliged to pay him a little visit? Settembrini did not like the idea -- Hans Castorp was shrewd and sensitive enough to see that clearly... The problem pupil needed only to ignore his [Settembrini’s] sensitivities and pretend innocence, and there was nothing to prevent him from cordially accepting little Naphta’s invitation -- which he did after the main rest cure one Sunday afternoon, only a few days following that first meeting. Joachim had to come along for better or worse.
...
P466 [Hans about a “naive pieta”] “What is this you have here?... It’s frightfully good. I’ve never seen such suffering. Very old, of course, is it not?”
“Fourteenth century... Presumably from the Rhineland. You’re impressed, aren’t you?”
“Enormously... It couldn’t help making an impression on one. I would never have thought that anything could be simultaneously so ugly -- beg your pardon -- and so beautiful.”
“Works of art from a world in which the soul expresses itself... are always beautiful to the point of ugliness and ugly to the point of beauty. It is a law. We are dealing with beauty of the Spirit, not of the flesh, which is basically stupid. And abstract, as well... The beauty of the body is abstract. Only inner beauty, the beauty of religious expression possesses true reality.”
“...Do you know the artist’s name?”
Naphta shrugged. “What does it matter?” he said. “We should not even ask, because at the time it was created no one asked either. There is no miracle-worker, no Mr. Individual Creator behind it -- it is an anonymous, communal work of art. It comes, of course, from the very advanced Middle Ages, the Gothic -- signum mortificationis... [According to Pirenne, “Gothic” was a derogatory term invented by Italian humanists. See HERE.] The entire work is a radical proclamation of suffering and the weakness of the flesh. It is not until the Gothic that tastes turn to true pessimistic asceticism...
“Herr Naphta... every word of everything you’ve said interests me. ‘Signum mortificationnis,’ was that it? I shall make a note of it. And just before that you mentioned ‘anonymous and communal,’ which also appears worth some serious thought. Sad to say, you guessed correctly about my not knowing the writings of that pope [Innocent III] -- I assume Innocent the Third was a pope. Did I understand you to say that the work is ascetic and witty? I must admit I’ve never thought those two things could go hand in hand, but now that I consider it, it seems quite plausible -- any discussion of human misery would offer a chance for witty remarks at the expense of the flesh...” [Naphta offers to loan him the book. They sit down for a snack and Settembrini appears.]
From Pirenne, The Situation of the Papacy in the 13th Century (Innocent III, the Pope taking advantage of the Italian banking system and the return of currency and the rise of capitalism in Italian cities, also what the Church meant and expected of people at this time, HERE. The conversation will soon come back to banking and finance, so Pirenne's text will be very handy, though not in agreement with Naphta.)
...
...All this... did not prevent Hans Castorp from gaining two distinct impressions from his arrival. First, he had the impression that Herr Settembrini had dropped by in order to keep him and Joachim -- or, actually, just him -- from being left alone with ugly little Naphta and to provide a pedagogic counterweight by his presence; second, it was quite evident that he had no objection to using the occasion to leave his lodgings in the attic for a while, exchanging them for Naphta’s silk-adorned room and a properly served tea... With obvious relish, indeed with open praise, he dined on layer cake, each narrow curving slice of which was richly veined with chocolate.
[Still talking about the pieta,] ...Too polite to say what he thought, he confined himself to remarks concerning errors in proportion and anatomical defects in the figures; such offenses against the truth of nature did not come close to moving him, he said, since they were based not on any primitive lack of skill but arose out of willful malice, out of an antagonistic principle. And Naphta maliciously agreed, saying that it certainly was not a question of any lack of technical skill. It was, rather, a matter of the emancipation of the Spirit from the bonds of nature, indeed, the work proclaimed a religious contempt for nature by refusing to submit to it. But when Settembrini declared that such a neglect of nature and a refusal to study her led humankind down a false path and then began in taunt words to contrast an absurd formlessness -- to which the Middle Ages and epochs that imitated it were addicted -- with classicism, with the Greco-Roman heritage of form, beauty, reason, and serenity born of natural piety, for classicism alone was destined to further the human enterprise, Hans Castorp interrupted him and asked how all that fitted in with Plotinus, who, as was well known, was ashamed of his own body, and with Voltaire, [Ha. Saw that coming] who in the name of reason had rebelled against the scandalous earthquake in Lisbon? Absurd? Yes, this work, too, was absurd, but when one stopped and considered the matter, one could... call absurdity an intellectually honorable position, and so the absurd enmity toward nature in Gothic art was ultimately as honorable as the gesture of a Plotinus or a Voltaire, for it expressed the same emancipation from the facts and givens, the same proud unwillingness to be enslaved, the same refusal to submit to dumb powers, that is, to nature.
P469 Naphta broke into that laugh of his that sounded like a porcelain plate and ended in a cough.
[Settembrini brings up the persecution of heretics and the inquisition. Naphta replies,] “All the same, it was in love’s service... that machinery was set in motion by which the cloister cleaned the world of its wicked citizens. All ecclesiastical punishments, even death at the stake, even excommunication, were imposed to save souls from eternal damnation, which cannot be said of the mad exterminations of the Jacobins. Allow me to remark, that every sort of torture, every bit of bloody justice, that does not arise from a belief in the next world is bestial nonsense. And as for the degradation of man, its history coincides exactly with the rise of the bourgeois spirit. [Mann/Naphta could have made use of Climate Change here, if it had been noticed.] The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the teachings of nineteenth-century science and economics have omitted nothing, absolutely nothing, that seemed even vaguely useful for furthering such degradation, beginning with modern astronomy -- which turned the focal point of the universe, the sublime arena where God and Satan struggled to posses the creature whom they ardently coveted, into an unimportant little planet, and, for now at least, has put an end to man’s grand position in the cosmos, upon which astrology was likewise based.”
P470 “For now?”
“Why, of course -- for a couple of centuries... The honor of the scholastics will be vindicated in this regard as well, if I am not mistaken. Indeed the process is well under way. Copernicus will be routed by Ptolemy. The theory of heliocentrism is now being opposed by intellectual forces whose efforts will presumably attain their desired goal. Science will find itself philosophically constrained once again to grant earth all the honors that Church dogma wished to preserve for it.”
...
[Naphta responds to Settembrini’s outburst,] “My good friend... there is no such thing as pure knowledge. The validity of ecclesiastical science -- which can be summarized in Saint Augustine’s statement: ‘I believe, that I may understand’ -- is absolutely incontrovertible. [Well... I found this, “For I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand. For this also I believe-that unless I believe I shall not understand.” -St. Anselm; and "I believe in order that I may understand." -St. Augustine] Faith is the vehicle of understanding, the intellect is secondary. Your unbiased science is a myth. Faith, a world view, an idea -- in short, the will -- is always present, and it is then reason’s task to examine and prove it. In the end we always come down to ‘quod erat demonstrandum.’ [Q.E.D. or "what was to be demonstrated"] The very notion of proof contains, psychologically speaking, a strong voluntaristic element. [2 : a theory that conceives will to be the dominant factor in experience or in the world.] The great scholastics of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were unanimous in their conviction that nothing could be true in philosophy that was theologically false. Let us set theology aside, if you like. A human race, however, that refuses to accept the proposition that nothing can be true in science that is false in philosophy, is not human. The argumentation of the Holy Office against Galileo stated that his theses were philosophically absurd. There can be no more cogent argument than that.”
The “not human” above is an interesting point. If one sees religion as man’s greatest invention -- the establishment of a moral order that does not exist in nature, that makes us “human.,” then there is considerable truth in this statement. And, this would bring us again to Nietzsche’s Übermensch. This is precisely what Nietzsche had in mind here -- despite all the people who miss his point. If “God is dead” then we must invent a new basis for humanity, a kind of super-humanity not based on the myth we’ve relied on for all these millennia. And it's very interesting to consider the Übermensch and the Homo Dei at the same time like this.
...”Such a triumph is an impossibility... because the authority is man himself -- his interests, his dignity, his salvation -- and there can be no contradiction between man and truth. They coincide.”
“Which means that truth is --”
“Whatever profits man is true. Nature herself is summarized in him; in all of nature, only he is created, and nature is solely for him. He is the measure of all things and his salvation is the criterion of truth. Theoretical knowledge with no practical application in the realm of man’s salvation is so totally uninteresting that we must deny it any value as truth and exclude it entirely. The Christian centuries were united in their view that the natural sciences were of no significance to man... I can assure you that mankind is about to find its way back to this point of view, to recognize that the task of true science is not the pursuit of worthless information, but rather the elimination on principle of what is pernicious, even of what is merely without significance as an idea, and... to proclaim instinct, moderation, choice... the Church... did what was right... in declaring criminal any ‘unbiased’ striving for a knowledge of things... any striving that casts aside those spiritual concerns aimed solely at winning salvation...”
P472 “What you are preaching is pragmatism... Whatever profits the state is good, true, and just. Its salvation, its dignity, its power is the criterion of morality. Fine -- and with that you have opened the door wide for every sort of crime. And as for human truth, justice for the individual, democracy -- well, you’ll see what becomes of them.”
...”Either Ptolemy and the scholastics are right, and the world is finite in time and space, which means that God is transcendent and the polarity of God and world is maintained, so that man, too, leads a dualistic existence, and the problem of his soul rests in the conflict between what his senses register and what transcends his senses, making all social issues entirely secondary -- this is indeed the only form of individualism that I recognize as logically consistent. Or, conversely, your Renaissance astronomers discovered the truth, and the cosmos is infinite, which means there is no world that transcends the senses, no dualism; the world beyond is absorbed into this world, the polarity of God and nature is annulled, and since the human personality is no longer the battlefield of two hostile principles, but rather harmonious and unified, all human conflict stems from the clash between the interests of the individual and of society as a whole, and so the purpose of the state becomes the law of morality, just as in good heathen days. It’s either one or the other.”
I'm going to break here, because the remainder of the section needs to be presented together. I will point out the importance of "suffering" for both Naphta, here, and Settembrini in his literary work.
I mentioned religion being man’s greatest invention, but maybe I need to say more about that. The visual wonders of nature make appealing the Argument From Design, that the beauty of nature reveals the hand of a Creator or Designer. The evolutionary alternative makes more sense to me, but if you are going to give a Creator credit for the visual beauty in nature you also have to give Her responsibility for the amorality of nature -- as revealed so well by Sallie Tisdale in "Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies" and Annie Dillard in A Pilgrim At Tinker Creek. From the (under appreciated) philosophical work of these two women we have to conclude either that God exists, and he lacks any “humane” ethical sense, or God doesn’t exist, and nature is amoral. In either case, it seems to me, man has invented the moral sense we like to attribute to a divinity. Here's an Annie Dillard quote from my other, other blog (link HERE,)
Either this world, my mother, is a monster, or I myself am a freak... We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet... We are moral creatures, then, in an amoral world. The universe that suckled us is a monster that does not care if we live or die -- does not care if it grinds itself to a halt.
In this respect, Dostoevsky is to Nietzsche as Edmund Burke is to Wollstonecraft and Godwin -- Dostoevsky doesn’t think man is up to the challenge of living honorably without God (though he does a bad job of showing us Orthodox Christians behaving honorably with God). Nietzsche wants to declare “God is dead” and move on to living without the fantasy we’ve created to keep the weak in line. While I would love to live in the world that Nietzsche and Mary Shelley’s parents dreamed of, I don’t have that kind of faith in man. Which means that I have to give Naphta’s argument about man being the measure of all things more credence than I’m comfortable with.
Also, the Mephistophelesian role of the natural sciences in the history of the past three centuries is hard to deny. Science has constantly promised to make things better only to also make them worse. Climate Change is a whole new line of argument Naphta could have thrown at Settembrini, who would today be hard pressed to have the same faith in progress.
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