Chapter 6
The Balance

I. Honor against Love

For the absolute lover, as for the saint, the world with its values of honor, justice, loyalty, and prudence is well lost in the realization of desire. For the knight and lady of the world, however, such a mystic end of all in ecstasy is not, and never has been, the ideal of a noble life; and in twelfth- and thirteenth-century France it was not even approximately the courtly ideal of amor. As one of the most sensitive recent critics of this literature, the late Mme. Myrrha Lot-Borodine, has pointed out: “It was not the French trouveres who conceived this type of ardent, blind, absolute passion: the disordering blast that blows from the Tristan poems hardly suggests the gentle fragrance of the sweet perfume of French courtesy.”^{Note 1}

It would seem, therefore, no more than appropriate, after all the time we have given to the secondary Continental tale, to glance back to the old Irish of the “love-spot” of Diarmuid O’Duibhne. For it is there that the primary clues appear to the source not only of the love-magic and forest themes, but also of the boar’s wound on Tristan’s thigh and his relationship thereby to the boar-slain god and hero-king of the old megalithic pig-god complex: the ever-dying, ever-living son, consort, and lover of the goddess-queen of the universe: Dumuzi-Osiris-Adonis. The antiquity of this tale goes back far beyond Celtic times; and the contrast, furthermore, of its Celtic version with the Greek of Theseus, the Minotaur, and the signal of the black sails reveals something of considerable interest concerning the balance of the northern, “romantic” Celto-Germanic element in our heritage, and the southern, “classical” Greco-Roman.

So then, it was in the reign, as we are told, of the earliest clearly historical High King of Ireland, Cormac son of Airt son of Conn of the Hundred Battles, who ruled in Tara two hundred years before the advent of Saint Patrick and exactly one thousand before the passing on of his daughter’s adventure to Isolt. Her name was Grianne. As daughter of the King, she had the privilege of being present on the field of champions at the time of a great goaling match. She was, moreover, the fairest of feature and form and speech of the women of the world. And it was then (as she later confessed) that she turned the light of her sight upon Diarmuid O’Duibhne, the man of most extraordinary beauty in the world; from which instant forward (as she averred) she never gave such love to any other: nor would she, forever.

Then, however, as it happened, immediately following that glance, Finn Mac Cumhaill (Finn McCool) arrived to sue for the princess’s hand and was himself a man of extraordinary beauty. Diarmuid was Finn’s sister’s son, as Tristan was to be Mark’s. Further, Diarmuid had on his forehead a love spot that he kept covered with his abundant wild Irish hair, lest women, beholding it, should become infatuated; for such was the virtue of that spot. However, Grianne with that glance had seen it. And when all then sat at tables, she filled a golden, jeweled, chased goblet with a drink sufficient for nine times nine men, which she handed to her handmaid. “Take the goblet first to Finn,” she said, “and tell him it is I that sent it.”

Now this Finn Mac Cumhaill was the same who is fabled to have guarded Dublin Bay for some two or three hundred years, and is now believed to sleep, like Arthur, either in a hill or on an isle somewhere, whence he will appear again with his giant fighting men, the Fianna,^{Note 2} at some hour of Ireland’s need. The title “Finn-again’s Wake” can be read to refer to this second coming; and Joyce, in fact, is reported to have told a friend that his polymorphous work was “‘about’ Finn lying dying by the river Liffey with the history of Ireland and the world cycling through his mind”^{Note 3}: an Irish fellow to William Blake’s English vision of the fallen giant Albion. So this story is of threefold interest: in its own right, for its influence on Tristan, and for its place in Finnegans Wake.

But, to get on: Finn received the goblet; and no sooner had he drunk a draft than he fell into a stupor of deep sleep. King Cormac took the next; and so all the rest. But the cup was not passed to Diarmuid; and Grianne turned to him her face.

“Will you accept courtship from me, O son of O’Duibhne?” she asked.

“I will not.”

“Then I put a geis on you,” she answered. A geis: that is to say, a dare, magically enforced, that can be refused only at extreme peril. “I put you under bonds of danger and destruction, if you do not take me out of this household tonight, before Finn Mac Cumhaill and Cormac, King of all Erin, awake and rise from that sleep. And I shall not part from you until death part me.”

“Then, O Grianne, go forward,” he answered. And Diarmuid yoked two horses to a chariot.

However, beyond the ford of Athlone the couple fled afoot; and that night, already in Galway, Diarmuid cleared the brush from the midst of a grove, set seven doors of wattles around, and in the center of that wood settled beneath Grianne a bed of tender tips of the birch and of soft rush, but himself slept without.

Finn, Cormac, and the rest next morning woke to find Diarmuid and Grianne gone; and Finn, seized with a burning jealousy and rage, sent his trackers to follow the path. They lost it at the ford, then discovered it and followed. Flight and pursuit continued in this manner for some weeks with adventure, and Diarmuid all the while preparing his bed apart from Grianne. But they also sheltered in caves, and when forced by lack of space to bed beside her, he placed a large rock between, or, others say, his sword.

Then of a day it chanced, when she was striding at his side, that Grianne’s foot plashed in a puddle and a jet of water scattered to her thigh. Softly, guardedly, she muttered to herself:

“A plague on thee, streaky splash!

Thou art bolder far than Diarmuid.”

 

“What is that you just said?” he asked.

“Oh, nothing at all,” she answered.

“Not so!” he said. “For I think I heard a part of it and won’t rest till I hear all.”

“O Diarmuid,” she then said to him, very timidly and modestly, “great is your bravery in war; but for encounters of another kind, this splash has had more courage than yourself.”

He was ashamed. And it was then he first took her to a thicket. And when they came that night into the forest, he made for them a hunting booth; and whereas formerly their fare had been salmon caught and broiled on a spit, that night Diarmuid slew a deer, and for the first time they enjoyed their fill together of clear water and fresh meat.

But now, there was another geis upon him, of which Finn Mac Cumhaill was aware; and it was, namely, never to hear the baying of hunting hounds without following the sound. Moreover, there was a boar of terrible strength then ravaging the country, and when Finn, one day out hunting, saw the whittlings of a stick floating down the waters of a brook, he recognized the whittling as of Diarmuid’s knife: for the speal curled nine times, and there was no one other in Ireland could do the like.

Finn, that night, released his hunting hounds, and Diarmuid heard the voice of one of them in his sleep, out of which he started. Grianne caught him, threw her two arms about him, and asked what he had seen.

“It is the voice of a hound I have heard,” he said; “and I marvel to hear it in the night.”

“It is the fairy people that are doing this to you,” she replied, and lulled him back to bed. Twice more he heard and started; and the last time, at dawn, went forth with his favorite hound.

Now when he came, in Sligo, to the table-topped Mount Benbulbin, up the face of it there came the wild boar at him and with all the Fianna after. His hound took flight. He cast his javelin, smote the beast in the fair middle of its face, without effect, then drew his sword and struck fully on its back, which heavy stroke cut not a bristle from the boar, but made two pieces of the sword. The animal tripped him and he fell astride its back, facing the rear of the beast that ran down the fall of the hill, turned about, ran up again, and, tossing Diarmuid, ripped him open with a tusk, so that his entrails fell about his feet. Nonetheless, with a triumphant cast of the hilt of his sword, he dashed out the brains of that boar and it fell beside him, without life. Whereupon Finn Mac Cumhaill appeared.

“Well, it pleases me, O Diarmuid,” he said, “to see you in this plight, and it grieves me only that all the women of Erin are not now gazing upon you; for your extraordinary beauty is now ugliness, and your choice form a deformity.”

“You might nevertheless heal me, O Finn, if you had a mind to it,” said Diarmuid.

“In what way could I do that?”

“When as a lad you received the gift of knowledge,” Diarmuid said, “from the salmon in the pool beneath the Tree of Knowledge, you received with it the gift that anyone to whom you would give a drink from the palms of your hands would be young and well again from any sickness.”

“I know of no well on this hill,” said Finn.

“That is not true,” Diarmuid answered. “For not nine footsteps away from you is the well of the best fresh water in the world.”

Finn went to the well. He took up the full of his two hands of water, and during the nine steps back let it trickle away through his fingers. Again he went, and again let it go. And so again; at the end of which third venture Diarmuid O’Duibhne was dead. And when Grianne, pregnant, standing on the wall of her fort, beheld the men of Finn’s hunt approaching without Diarmuid, she fell from the wall and gave birth to three dead sons.

Finn with his eloquence, however, presently persuaded her to his own fort and bed in peace; and they remained with one another until death.^{Note 4}

Mme. Lot-Borodine was correct: "Ce ne sont pas les trouvères français qui ont créé ce type de la passion brûlante, aveugle, absolue.” Professor Roger S. Loomis, the leading recent authority on this subject, held that it was in Wales that the Irish elopement tale of Diarmuid and Grianne was joined to the Pictish-Cornish composite of Tristan, Isolt, and King Mark; whence the amplified composite, some time before the year 1000, passed to Brittany. And there it chanced that a certain Lord Rivalon named a son after its hero, with the curious effect that in later years this son was thought to have been the hero Tristan himself; so that instead of the Pictish Drustan son of Talorc, it was a Breton Tristan son of Rivalon that was sung by the Breton conteurs.^{Note 5}

The earliest versions of the resultant Pictish-Welsh-Cornish-Irish-Breton romance are forever lost. However, the best scholars now believe that a period of largely oral development must be assumed, c. 1066–1150, when both Welsh and Breton fabulators were made welcome in the French and Norman courts. Thomas of Britain credits his source, for instance, to a certain Welsh author, Bréri, whose name has been rendered by others, variously, as Bledri, Bleheris, and Blihis.^{Note 6} Thomas declares that this Bréri knew “all the feats and all the tales of all the kings and all the courts who had lived in Britain.”^{Note 7} Another author states that he possessed the knowledge of the secret of the Grail.^{Note 8} A third declares not only that he was “born and begotten in Wales,” but also that it was he who introduced the legend of Gawain to the court of the Count of Poitiers^{Note 9} — that Count having been either William IX of Aquitaine or his son William X, respectively the grandfather and the father of Queen Eleanor: and that Provencal court itself, at the very border of Spain, was precisely the first and foremost province in the West to be touched by the influence of the Moors. So that, no matter what the earlier relationship (if any) of the Celtic tradition to Islam may have been (Compare The World Transformed and The Word Behind Words here and here.), we have here, absolutely without question, a significant creative matrix, where Islamic, Celtic, and classical lore, both esoteric and popular, came together and combined in a highly sophisticated environment, to be carried then, in newly rendered forms, to all the courts of the Western world.

Among the primary Celtic themes derived specifically from the Diarmuid and Grianne romance, we may note the idea of a potion (sleep-producing in the Irish tale), love-magic of irresistible force (the love-spot), the flight and forest years, the sword between, and the nephew-uncle (i.e. matrilineal) relationship. The detail of the speal coming down the stream also is matched in the Tristan tale by an episode in which the lover sends whittlings down a stream to his lady, which arouse suspicions in Mark (It is interesting and puzzling to compare this Celtic complex with the Japanese legend of the chopsticks floating down the stream, seen by Susano-O, who ascends, to slay a dragon and win a wife. Oriental Mythology.). And finally, the detail of the bold splash appears in relation to the second Isolt, who was riding beside her brother when her palfrey’s hoof splashed in a puddle as she opened her legs to give spur; the cold water splashed the inside of her thigh and she gave a startled cry, but then, deep in her heart, thought of something, whereat she laughed so hard that if threatened with a penance of forty days she could not have stopped. When her brother asked the reason, she answered: “This splash has been more bold than ever was Tristan.”

How soon or where the classical matter was brought into the legend is not clear at all. The parallels are many and so essential both structurally and symbolically that the contact cannot have been late. A case might even be made for direct derivation, somewhere, somehow, from the Minotaur and labyrinth legend, or some other closely related early Bronze Age mythic cycle; both the northern and the southern tales then being interpreted as local variants, reshaped by local manners, of a strain of ritual and mythic lore stemming ultimately from that ageless, widely disseminated, primitive planter complex defined and discussed in Primitive Mythology in the chapters on “The Ritual Love-Death” and “The Province of the Immolated Kings.”^{Note 10}

The white-or-black-sail motive, which is, of course, the most striking indicator, opens to many more parallels. We have already remarked the periodic tributes. Equally noteworthy is the fact that in both legends the hero is the oppressed king’s heir, his son (patrilineal tradition) or adopted nephew (matrilineal). Theseus, setting forth, was provided by his father, King Aegeus, with a black as well as a white set of sails, and, if the Minotaur were slain, was to return with the white unfurled, if not, the black. He was aided in Crete by Ariadne, daughter of King Minos and half-sister of the Minotaur: compare Isolt, daughter of King Gurmun the Gay and niece of the dragon-knight. Having slain the Minotaur, he took the princess with him, but on the island of Dia abandoned her — as Tristan, after killing the dragon, sailed away with Isolt, but then gave her to King Mark; at which point, however, the tales appear to go apart. According to one Greek version, the abandoned Ariadne hanged herself; according to a second, she had remained behind because pregnant; according to a third, however, the god Dionysus ravished her from Dia and carried her to Naxos, where first he, then she disappeared. In any case, Theseus had lost her, and there was such confusion aboard when his ship put out to sea again that the crew forgot the sails, and King Aegeus, watching from a coastal cliff, supposing the black to signify his son’s failure, flung himself from the cliff into the sea that to this day bears his name. Thus the greeting of the hero when he stepped ashore in the city, of which he now was king, was equally mixed of jubilation and grief.^{Note 11}

In the Greek legend the woman is abandoned and a throne gained, as in the later Roman Virgilian legend of Dido and Aeneas; whereas in the Celtic, as a consequence of the fairy magic of the potion (which, as we have seen, was of Irish provenance), the results are reversed. Also, the tragedy is reversed: in the Greek legend the father dies when the wrong sail appears, in the Celtic legend, the son.

But to glance now at the beginnings of these two hero lives: Tristan as a child arrived unknown at the castle of his uncle; Theseus likewise at the palace of his father. For Aegeus had begotten him out of wedlock, on the daughter of the governor of a city in Argolis, and had left as tokens only a pair of shoes and a sword beneath an extremely heavy stone, giving the mother to understand that if the child she bore were a boy, he would be able, on coming to manhood, to lift the stone (as in later romance the young Arthur, also born out of wedlock, was to prove himself the son of a king by drawing the sword Excalibur from its stone). The youngster was fostered by his grandfather, Pittheus, here in the role played in the Tristan tale by Rivalin’s loyal marshal. He was put to study under a tutor, Connidas, who is the counterpart of Curvenal. And in due time he did lift the stone, after which he came, unrecognized and unknown, to the palace of his father, who was then living with the sorceress Medea.

For after begetting his only son, Aegeus had been rendered sterile by a curse (a debility consistent with the bachelorhood of King Mark), from which Medea had promised to relieve him by her magic art: and her presence suggests a comparison of this palace rather with the perilous situation into which Tristan came at the Irish court of Gurmun the Gay and the sorceress Queen Isolt, than with his childhood arrival at Tintagel. For, according to Euripides, Medea had a chariot drawn by dragons. We have seen that the guardian of the Irish house, the brother of Queen Isolt, not only bore the emblem of a dragon, but fought with a poisoned blade, and in the second Irish adventure was supplanted by an actual dragon, whose tongue infected Tristan with its poison. The young Theseus, on arrival, did not reveal his identity, but Medea knew who he was and sought to kill him at a banquet with a poisoned cup of wine. However, the father, in the nick of time, recognizing the token of the sword, struck the poisoned goblet to the floor. There followed the adventure of the Minotaur, where — according to Plutarch’s account — the protectress of the voyage was the goddess Aphrodite. On the Irish adventure, Tristan — in Gottfried’s account — bore the arrow of love emblazoned on his helm. But in both legends the goddess of love was ill served; for the maid, her agent, through whom death was overcome, was in both adventures abandoned. Whereupon the boon of Love was transformed, became daemonic, diabolic, and the goddess took a terrible revenge.

She took revenge in Theseus case, first and almost immediately, in the confusion aboard his ship, which eventuated in his father’s death; but then, years later, in his maturity, more terribly and with devastation to his whole life, through the fatal passion of his queen, Phaedra, for Hippolytus, his son — to the destruction of both. Which is again, essentially, the Tristan theme, but from an alien point of view, with Theseus now in the place of Mark, Phaedra’s nurse in that of Brangaene, and the moral, as chanted by the chorus of Palace Women in the tragedy Hippolytus of Euripides, of love not as a boon but as a curse:

I pray that Love may never come to me

with murderous intent,

in rhythms measureless and wild.

 

Not fire nor stars have stronger bolts

than those of Aphrodite,

sent by the hand of Eros, Zeus’s child.

 

Love is like a flitting bee in the world’s garden

and for its flowers, destruction is in his breath.^{Note 12}

That is hardly as Heloise would have sung; or Isolt, Tristan, or Gottfried. For the Greek, in contrast to the Celtic-medieval version of the shared theme and legend, has stressed the standpoint of the world, society and achievement, ethical values and common day, against the abyss of inwardness, erotic-personal values, and the realization of rapture. As in Virgil’s legend of Aeneas’s desertion of Dido to assume manfully his epochal, hard historical role as founder of mighty Rome, so here: it is ROMA against AMOR, the task of the day against the mysteries of night; time and its call against eviternity; the one that is two against the two that are one.

Yet in both versions of the legend the irony of the choice is recognized as tragic: an illustration of the intrinsic dissonance that is the beginning and end of a properly human life, doomed in the end, either way, to reversal. Theseus denied Aphrodite in his desertion of Ariadne, and his son, Hippolytus, a lover only of horses, denied Aphrodite absolutely. As in Abelard’s case, so in both of these, a world philosophy and associated ethical program, formulated previously to the opening and offering of a new dimension of experience, was held to, when the time had come to consider something else. And Tristan’s case was much the same. He was so taken with the maid Isolt that when he returned from his first visit he could talk of nothing else; yet his concept of his place in the courtly world was such that he never thought of winning her for himself.

However, in his case, when the new dimension could no longer be denied, he gave in — with a will; and the old world of honor and chivalrous deeds fell away. Its heroic values lost force. And yet — and here was the circumstance of his tragedy — the rest of the world remained attached still to the old, and would have it that way, and in fact had to. Nor, finally, were the claims of the old completely wiped out of the lives and minds even of Isolt and Tristan. That was the sense of the sword between them. For mystic harmony, peace, and the idyll of the ideal realized, as in the forest refuge of the grotto, do not yield a properly human life at all. They are of the womb, before — and of the tomb, hereafter — and, as such, are for the meditations of what Nietzsche called “yonder-worldings.”

Yet they are also — and here is Gottfried’s point — of the ultimate depth and very ground of our existence here and now, where they can and must be found and affirmed along with the dissonance, while the latter is sounded with all power, crescendo to fortissimo. That is why Nietzsche wrote of man as “the sick animal,” celebrating doubt, ill health, decay, and decadence — what Thomas Mann
Figure 59. Thomas Mann, c. 1929in The Magic Mountain, writing in Nietzsche’s spirit, has called “temperature” — as the essential characteristics of life in the process of alchemical transmutation, “surpassing itself,” becoming golden. That is the earthly way to the knowledge of the secret of the “door of the concidence of opposites” of which Cusanus wrote, “which the angel guardeth that is set over the entrance into Paradise.” And that is what Joyce is singing about in every sentence of Finnegans Wake, where, as he states in one of his key passages, joy and sorrow, violence and love, male and female, the sword and the pen, profit and loss, day and night, “cumjustle” with each other “as neatly…” (but here let us set the sentence apart a bit, for contemplation, like a poem):

^*isce et ille (Latin), “that there and that”; iste, “that (yonder).”

^†Sym­physis (Greek), “a growing together, a natural junction” (as of bones), as being not mere contact but continuity of substance.as neatly … as were they isce et ille* equals of opposites,

evolved by a onesame power of nature or of spirit, iste,

as the sole condition of its himunderher manifestation

and polarized for reunion by the symphysis^† of their

antipathies.^{Note 13}

In short, the choral chant of the Palace Women in Euripides’ Hippolytus, and the sudden tragedy of the socially oriented, sunnyside-up personalities of the Greek plot, stand for the values, dangers, and way of experiencing destiny of the people of this world on the King Mark side of Gottfried’s piece, for whom duty and honor, social ties and service, are the measures of personal merit; whereas in the Celtic and medieval “romantic” works of the northern poets, whom the mists of Gothic forests and the fogs of coastal seas had seasoned with the inwardness of sweet melancholy, there is another song: a lyric learned in silence, alone, by one, or by two together, of the “noble heart,” unafraid of the unmarked way. “Lord,” sings Joyce, “heap miseries upon us yet entwine our arts with laughters low.”^{Note 14}

II. The Individual and the State

Among the most important of those authors of the first half of the present century who, together with James Joyce, transformed the naturalistic nineteenth-century society novel into a secular vehicle of mythological wisdom and symbolic initiations, Thomas Mann (1875–1955) was perhaps the most ardently aware of the social and pedagogical relevance, and consequent responsibilities, of his profession. Contrary to the way of Joyce, whose point of conscience it was to remain from first to last the artist, with the absolutely impartial binocular vision of an Olympian — nonparticipant as partisan, omniparticipant as viewer and mover — Thomas Mann, throughout his long, productive career, was always seriously engaged, either covertly or explicitly, in delivering a sociological, political — and, in his later years, mystagogic — message.

Now I do not wish to compare him in this point to such a socialistic tub-thumper as Bernard Shaw, who himself declared that the very long prefaces to his plays were as much to his purpose as the plays themselves; however, it is a fact that as an essayist, elucidating the philosophical and sociological backgrounds and implications of his own creative achievements, Thomas Mann is hardly matched in the history of letters. The essays, which are numerous and as sedulously composed as the fictional works themselves, are among the most illuminating and important treatments we possess of the relationships of modern literature to those spheres of experience and symbolic communication that in the past were the province of myth alone. And in relation to the study of mythology itself — its sources, meanings, and moral implications for today — there have been no more sophisticated elucidations.

For it is simply a fact (as I have already remarked in my Prologue to the first volume of this tetralogy) that poets and artists, who are dealing every day of their lives with the feeling- as well as thought-values of their own imageries of communication, are endowed with a developed organ for the understanding of myth that is too often lacking in the merely learned; so that when the artist or poet is also learned, he may be a more dependable guide to the nuclear themes of a given mythic complex, and a much more profound interpreter of their relevance to life, than even the most respected of its specialized academic elucidators. And finally, since Mann, as I have just said, was concerned not simply with the universal psychological and metaphysical implications of his mythological symbols, but also with their practical, moral and political application, he was compelled, during the long and stately course of his career in a period of catastrophic changes in the character of European culture, to commit his art and sympathies first to one extreme, then to the other, of the social-political spectrum, until in the end he found himself in such a whirlabout of reversals that the magnificent ship of his art began to crack and to leak Hermetic water at the seams. Thus the careful student of his interpretations is provided not only with readings of equal perspicacity from more than one point of view, but also with what my grandmother would have called “a good object lesson” in the mercurial nature of mythological universals. And in addition, since Mann knew exactly what he was doing — shutting first one eye, then the other — there is in that a further lesson for the student of morality, as well as a corollary, touching the discipline of the parallax, for the student of binocular vision.

Mann’s earliest schematic formulation of the contrasting terms of the problem that he continued to revolve in his mind to the end of his days was presented in a very early short story entitled “Tristan” (1902), which, like his later masterpiece, The Magic Mountain (1924), had for its setting a tuberculosis sanatorium, and for its theme the counterplay and dialogue, in that setting, of the will to freedom and peace against the will to life — twenty years before Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle,^{Note 15} As its date reveals, at the time of the publication of this short story, in which an astonishing number of those themes were announced that in the later novel were to be developed and expanded to the magnitude of a symphony in honor of the Lord-and- Lady Hermes-Aphrodite of the left-hand way to illumination, the author was but twenty-seven years old. His novel Buddenbrooks (1902) had already won renown; and two more short works, “Tonio Kröger” (1903) and the play Fiorenza (1904), were immediately to follow. Those were the critical years of his career, during which his fundamental philosophical stance was being established on a base principally of Goethe, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche, with a touch, as well, of Dostoevski and Tolstoi. The principal texts around which his cogitations revolved, besides Goethe’s Faust and Wagner’s operas, were Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Schopenhauer’s speculative essay “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual.” These works brought his thinking to focus almost compulsively on the enigma of death and renewal, on the psychological factors contributing to both individual and social disintegration, and on those contrary factors that might be counted on to withstand, or even overcome, the processes of dissolution and death. In a letter “On Marriage,” sent to Count Hermann Keyserling in the late nineteen-twenties, Mann declared: “For me the concepts of death and individualism have always coalesced.… and the concept of life, on the other hand, has united with those of duty, service, social ties, and even worth.”^{Note 16} However, things were not really quite as simple as that in his mind. For in the course of his long career the various elements of these opposed combinations occasionally separated from their fellows and changed sides. The series of cultural shocks delivered by the cataclysms of his century (during the rapid sequence of which the nation and folk of his first concern, which in his earliest order of alignment had represented duty and service to life, became for him the symbol of ultimate evil) left him finally with no ground on earth on which to stand. In terms of the basic philosophic position that he had made his own by 1902, this should not have greatly surprised or unsettled him. However, he had also in those critical years given his heart, as he declared in his novella “Tonio Kröger,” to the normal, usual, fair, and living, happy, and commonplace human beings of this world, and not even the power of his disengaged, sophisticated artist eye and mind could accept with equanimity what they had done.

“I stand between two worlds,” his hero, Tonio, had written to a young Russian intellectual, Lisabeta, in that work.

I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me I don’t know which makes me feel worse. The bourgeois are stupid; but you adorers of the beautiful, who call me phlegmatic and without aspirations, you ought to realize that there is a way of being an artist that goes so deep and is so much a matter of origins and destinies that no longing seems to it sweeter and more worth knowing than longing after the bliss of the commonplace.

I admire those proud, cold beings who adventure upon the paths of great and daemonic beauty and despise “mankind”; but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my bourgeois love of the human, the living and usual. It is the source of all warmth, goodness, and humor; I even almost think it is itself that love of which it stands written that one may speak with the tongues of men and of angels and yet having it not be as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.…

Do not chide this love, Lisabeta; it is good and fruitful. There is longing in it, and a gentle envy; a touch of contempt and no little innocent bliss.^{Note 17}

In his earlier short story, “Tristan,” the side of prosperous, buoyant life is represented by a lusty, rather peasant-like redfaced big-businessman, Herr Klöterjahn by name, of the firm A. C. Klöterjahn and Co., who arrived at the sanatorium Einfried only to deposit there — with care and tender concern — his exquisitely fragile young wife, who, since giving birth with extreme difficulty to their vigorously blooming baby boy, had been afflicted with a tracheal condition dangerously close to consumption. She had been ordered to Einfried by her doctor to find rest, repose from all agitation, release from duties for a while, and the very best medical attention. While on the other side, the cause of art, beauty, intellect, and the spirit was represented by an odd unsocial little person with very large feet, Detlev Spinell, in his early thirties, yet graying already at the temples, and known to the wits of the sanatorium as the moldy infant. He had once composed a short novel, now in print in a large volume, every single letter of the jacket of which had the look of a Gothic cathedral; and he kept this on a table in his room, where he spent the days writing letters. He was at Einfried, he would say, not for the cure, but because of the Empire style of the furniture; and on beholding any sudden sight of beauty — two matching colors, mountains tinged by a sunset — “How beautiful!” he would exclaim in a paroxysm of sensibility, pitching his head to one side, lifting his shoulders, spreading out his hands, and distending lips and nostrils. “God! just look! how beautiful!” he would cry and then fling his arms about the neck of any person, male or female, at hand.

Well, to make an elegant short story very short indeed: To everybody’s amazement, for he had never sought company before, this gift of the spirit to Einfried became, as soon as he beheld her, the solicitous, humble servant of the lovely Frau Kloterjahn’s exquisite beauty. Then he did two things: he flattered her refinement as too spiritual for this coarse world and for the husband whose coarse name ill befitted her; then he induced her to play again the piano, as she had played it in her childhood, when her father had played the violin. “But the doctors have expressely forbidden it,” she said. “They are not here,” he answered; “we are free.… Dear Madam, if you are afraid of doing yourself injury, then let the beauty be dead and still that might have come into being from the touch of your fingers.…”

She played. And it went from Chopin’s Nocturnes to Wagner’s Tristan: Oh, the boundless, inexhaustible joy of that union eternal beyond the bounds of time, et cetera.… Two days later there was blood on her handkerchief, and not long thereafter Kloterjahn was summoned to what proved to be her last hours. Spinell wrote him a letter: a personally insulting presentation of his hate-filled case against life; and the sturdy man of the world, in reply, simply walked into the author’s room and told him to his face what he was: an impotent clown, a coward, and a sneak, scared sick of reality, and with beauty on his tongue that was nothing more than hypocrisy and a fool’s grudge against life.

The radical opposition of the two hemispheres of experience and value represented in this story, on one hand by the man of business, healthy and socially at ease in his world of aggressive, unselfcritical, lusty life, and on the other by Spinell in his favorite sanatorium, with its pleasant grounds and garden, rambling walks, grottoes, bowers, and little rustic pavilions, is matched in the medieval legend by the contrast of the courtly world of King Mark, with its uncritically accepted and enforced customs of both courtesy and religious faith, and, on the other hand, the couple in the wilderness and its timeless grotto. There is an Oriental analogy also intended; one suggested by the works of Schopenhauer and their reflection in Wagner’s theme: namely of the contrast recognized in India between the two worlds, on one hand of life in the context of society, bound to the wheel of ignorance, suffering, rebirth, old age, and death, and on the other of life in the forest, in the penitential groves, striving by all means to achieve release from the senseless round. However, in India, in neither of these situations does the problem of individuality arise. For in the social sphere one obeys — one is compelled to obey — the ritual laws and disciplines of one’s caste, without resistance, without question, whereas in the penitential groves the aim is not to realize individuality but to erase it, to eliminate absolutely and forever whatever taint or trace of ego, personal will, and individuality may yet remain to one, even after a lifetime — yea, innumerable lifetimes — of the socially enforced, impersonal disciplines of caste.^{Note 18}

In our modern European West, on the other hand, largely as a result of the forthright intransigency of a sufficient number of actually great, courageous individuals, the principle of individuality and an appreciation of the worth of individuality have won through — at least for the present. So that, properly, the forest must have here an altogether different sense from that assigned to it in any Indian code. “I will not serve that in which I no longer believe,” declared Joyce’s hero, Stephen Dedalus, “whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church; and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile, and cunning.”^{Note 19} That has a very different ring from self-erasure. And so there is a new problem to be faced here: one that for the West and for the coming history and character of civilization is to be decisive, either as solved and integrated socially in our institutions, or as lost — beneath the rising waves of Asia. For it has been in Europe and the European sphere alone (which includes, for now at least, North America), that this problem of the radical dissociation and collision of individual and group values has emerged as the critical challenge of a maturing humanistic civilization.

But the difficulties posed are great. Chiefly they derive from the fact that the values of both of the opposed hemispheres, the individual and the social, are positive; hence, by all the laws both of physics and of biology, mutally repellent. That is to say, the partisans of each banner view the values of the other side merely as negative to their own and therefore, in every attempt either to attack or to achieve concord, succeed only in dealing with their own negative projections, giving battle to their own shadows on the walls of their own closed minds — which presents a fine circus of clowns for the laughter of the gods, but for mankind, with increasing danger, a turba philosophorum that is being reflected not in a sealed retort but in the carnage of exploded cities.

Somewhere about midway between the dates of his letter to Count Keyserling on marriage and his youthful composition of “Tristan,” Thomas Mann, during the years of the First World War, was revolving, from one viewpoint to another, his thoughts on the counterplay of opposites that was at that time represented to him by the contending ideals of Germany and the Western Allies. And as he had already made things a little difficult for himself by associating individualism with death and submission to the social order with life, so now he added to his philosophical stress by linking radicalism with individualism and conservatism with duty, associating the latter with German culture and the former with the French Revolution, English economic materialism, international class socialism, and the ideals of a money-based luxury civilization. He made a great many statements in this book that he came later to regret, and retracted. However, it is the work out of which The Magic Mountain came: a fearless, really extraordinary work of self-scrutiny and analysis, a night-book of lightning flashes bursting from dark impenetrable clouds; and is to be read as a diary of such confusion as anyone of good will, condemned by destiny to settle his own mind with respect to the values at stake in a modern war of mighty nations, of which his own was one, might, if he had the courage to do so, force himself to write. The work, first published 1919, and then, abridged, in 1922, bore the title Reflections of a Non-Political Man, and the following brief selection lets the reader know why.

Politics I hate, and the belief in politics, because it makes people arrogant, doctrinaire, harsh, and inhuman. I do not believe in the formulae of the anthill, the human beehive; do not believe in the république démocratique, sociale et universelle; do not believe that mankind was made for what is being called “happiness,” or that it even wants this “happiness,” — do not believe in “belief,” but rather in despair, because it is this that clears the way to deliverance; I believe in humility and work — work on oneself, and the highest, noblest, sternest, and most joyous form of such work seems to me to be art.^{Note 20}

In those days Mann identified this kind of work on oneself, humility, and integrity, with what he termed at that time the “aristocratic principle,” exemplified in Europe pre-eminently, in his view, by the culture ideal and discipline of the Germans, in contrast not only to the highly emotional class revolution of the French with its “Marseillaise” and guillotine, but also to the coldblooded, utilitarian, economic materialism of the Anglo-Saxon Industrial Revolution, while Marxism he described as but “a fusion of French revolutionary thought and English political economy.”^{Note 21} “You party politicians,” he could at that time write, quoting Strindberg, “are like one-eyed cats. Some of you see only with the left eye, others only with the right, and for that reason you can never see stereoscopically, but only one-sidedly and flat.” And again, still quoting the Swedish author: “As poet, one has a right to play with ideas, to experiment with standpoints, but not bind oneself to anything: for freedom is the life breath of the poet.”^{Note 22} And the real good of humanity, as he then believed, was served in art, not in manifestos; for the curse of politics, mass politics, socalled democratic politics, derived from its reduction of all life, art itself, and religion as well, to politics, the marketplace, newspaper thinking. “No experience,” he wrote, “is more likely to put politics out of mind, more thoroughly prove it irrelevant, and better teach how to forget it, than the experience, through art, of what is everlasting in man. And at a time when world political events of truly fearful force are involving all that is in us of individual human worth in sympathetic participation, overwhelming it and bearing it away — precisely at such a time it is fitting to stand firm against the megalomaniacs of politics, in defense, namely, of the truth that the essential thing in life, the true humanity of life, never is even touched by political means.”^{Note 23} “Man is not only a social, but also a metaphysical being. In other words, he is not merely a social individual, but also a personality. Consequently, it is wrong to confuse what is above the individual in us with society, to translate it completely into sociology. Doing that, one leaves the metaphysical aspect of the person, what is truly above the individual, out of account; for it is in the personality, not the mass, that the actual superordinated principle is to be found.”^{Note 24}

So far, so good. No one who has ever understood or experienced anything either of art or of life — anything, that is to say, beyond the sphere of sociology — would have much to say against all that. However, the author, in addition, had involved himself in this book (in spite of its nonpolitical title) in a political commitment to the idea and cause of German culture, against what he conceived to be the revolutionary internationalism of the bourgeois (French, English, and incidentally American) democracies. Moreover, by 1930, having made that first mistake, he had gone on to the logical second. He had abandoned his earlier distinction between the personal and social spheres and had aligned himself with the latter, in the currently fashionable way of Marxist socialism — even to the point of identifying Marxism, in a manner that was also fashionable at that time, with the progressive ideals of bourgeois liberalism and democracy. But this identification he had already made in his nonpolitical “Reflections”; so that he was now simply shifting allegiance from one pole of his own dichotomy to the other. And to make matters even more confusing, both for himself and for those still striving to admire him, he refused to concede that in turning from one side of his ledger to the other, he had left the values of the first behind. What he had been calling the “spiritual values” of the “aristocratic principle” — i.e. (as he understood them) the personally responsible, dutiful, form-conserving, humanistic ideals of a worthy people’s national heritage — he now simply transferred to the workers’ class revolution, reducing even the experience of God (in orthodox Levantine-Marxist style) to a social occasion:

“The human race dwells on earth in communities,” he announced in a talk on “Culture and Socialism,” published in the same volume, called The Challenge of the Day (1930), in which the letter to Count Keyserling “On Marriage” appears; “and there is no sort of individual realization or direct relationship to God, to which some form of association — of sociability — does not correspond. The religious ‘I’ becomes corporative in the parish.” [That is the Judas kiss.] “The cultural ‘I’ celebrates its festival in the form and name of the community — which is a word that bears in Germany strong religious and aristocratic associations, setting the holiness of its idea of social life altogether apart from the concept of society of the democracies.… German socialism, the invention of a Jewish social theorist trained in Western Eu­rope, has always been felt by German cultural piety to be alien to this land and contrary to the national heritage, indeed sheer devilry, and has been accordingly despised” — and now comes the crucial gambit and the timely transfer of values:

and with full right; for it does indeed represent the dissolution of the idea of a national culture and community, in the name of an idea of social classes to which that of the nation and community is opposed. However, the fact of the situation is, that this process of dissolution has already progressed to such a degree that the complex of German cultural ideas signified by the terms “nation” and “community” can be today dismissed as mere romanticism; and life itself, with all its meaning for the present and for the future is now, without doubt, on the side of socialism.… For although the spiritual significance of individualistic idealism derived originally from its connection with the idea of a cultural heritage, whereas the socialistic class concept has never denied its purely economic origin, the latter nevertheless entertains today far friendlier relations with the sphere of the spirit than does its romantically nationalistic middle-class antagonist, the conservatism of which has clearly, for all to see, lost touch and sympathy with the living spirit and its present-day demands.

The author had spoken on other occasions of the discrepancy, which others have also remarked, between the nobility and wisdom of the greatest men of our times and the lag in the public domain of law and international affairs, and he recurs now to this theme, to advance and settle his argument.

I have recently spoken elsewhere, of the unhealthy and dangerous tension that has developed in our world between the state of knowledge already attained and spiritually assimilated by those who represent the summits of our humanity and the material actualities of our present; pointing also to the dangers potential in this tension. The socialistic class, the working class, shows an unquestionably better and more vital will to overcome this shameful and dangerous discrepancy than does its cultural adversary, whether it be in matters of legislation, the rationalization of public affairs, the international conception of Europe, or what you will. It is indeed true that the socialistic class concept, in contrast to the idea of a national culture, is in its economic theory antagonistic to spiritual values; nevertheless in practice it favors them, and that, as things stand today, is what really counts.^{Note 25}

Within a decade of the delivery of this talk, the world’s supreme model of the economically based but spiritually disposed socialistic class-state joined hands with the nationally based, unspiritual socialistic state, to invade, dismember, and share Poland, and so began the Second World War. Thomas Mann, in due time, took flight, not to socialistic Russia but, by way of nonparticipant Switzerland, first to Princeton, then to Hollywood, whence, from the distant shores of the Pacific, a few hours before Pearl Harbor, he sent off the following radio broadcast to the German people:

German listeners, he who speaks to you today was fortunate enough to do something for the intellectual reputation of Germany in the course of his long life. I am grateful for this, but I have no right to pride myself for it, as it was destiny and did not lie in my hand.

No artist accomplishes his work in order to increase the glory of his country. The source of productivity is individual conscience. You Germans are not allowed to thank me for my work, even if you desired to do so. So be it. It was accomplished not for your sake but from innermost need.

But there is one thing which has been done really for your sake, which has developed from social and not private conscience. With every day I am more and more certain that the time will come, and, in fact, is already near at hand, when you will thank me for it and rate it higher than my stories and books. And this is, that I warned you, when it was not yet too late, against the depraved powers under whose yoke you are harnessed today and who lead you through innumerable misdeeds to incredible misery. I knew them. I knew that nothing but catastrophe and misery for Germany and for Europe would grow from their unspeakably base nature while the majority of you were seeing in them the forces of order, beauty, and national dignity — blinded as you were to a degree which today has unquestionably already become incredible to yourselves.…

Collapse is near. Your troops in Russia lack doctors, nurses, medical supplies. In German hospitals the severely wounded, the old and feeble are killed with poison gas — in one single institution, two to three thousand, a German doctor has said.… Comparable to the mass poisoning is the compulsory copulation where soldiers on leave are ordered to go like stud horses to the young German girls in order to produce sons of the State for the next war. Can a nation, can youth sink lower? Can there be a greater blasphemy of humanity?… Three hundred thousand Serbs were killed by you Germans at the order of the villainous men who govern you, not during the war, but after the war had ended in that country. Unspeakable are the deeds against the Jews and the Poles. But you do not want to acknowledge the ever-growing gigantic hatred which one day, when the forces of your people finally weaken, is bound to engulf you all.

Yes, it is right to feel the horror of this day. And your leaders know it. They who led you to commit all those horrible deeds tell you that you are chained to them through these deeds and that you must stand by them to the end; otherwise hell will come over you. If you break with them you will still be able to be saved, to gain freedom and peace.^{Note 26}

Thus, in the end as in the beginning, under pressure, heat, and horror sufficient to effect a fermentatio, the artist again became separate and rediscovered for himself in old age what both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had taught him in his youth: that between the individual and the multitude, a man’s integrity and his society, the inward and the outer, categorical and contingent worlds of experience and commitment, there is indeed an opposition, as deep as to the ground of being. I have italicized the paragraph that makes this point. It has the ring, a bit, of Detlev Spinell. But in the following sentence we learn of something of which Spinell seems not to have known, namely, a distinction between private and social conscience: and this we now must recognize as posing a profound problem — the problem, I should say — that from the period of the early Tristan poets, when it first seriously emerged in our literature in terms of the tragic tension between minne and ere, love and honor, has remained unresolved in the West to the present.

Mann’s radio address was broadcast, we have said, but a few hours before the Japanese dawn raid on Pearl Harbor. Soon the prophesied fire and brimstone were purging to rubble the culturecities of Central Europe: Munich, Dresden, Frankfurt, Marburg, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin. The monstrous empire of Hitler dissolved and the armies of Stalin’s no less monstrous slave state moved supreme across the European heartland, across half the European map. Within a decade another Asian monster, its Chinese counterpart, was standing back to back with it, also breathing fire — a fire furnished to both, ironically, by the sciences of the West — while the Dutch, Belgian, French, and British world empires meanwhile went to pieces; so that by 1950 a scientifically enforced Asiatization of world affairs was beginning to be evident, which, as far at least as the politics of the free individual are concerned, is the leading challenge of the present hour. The old Bronze Age world image of an absolutely inexorable, mathematical cosmology of which the social order is but an aspect (which, as we have seen, is at the base of both the Chinese and the Indian world views),^{Note 27} now supplemented by an equally inexorable Marxian notion of the logic of history, and implemented in its inhumanity by a modern mechanical technology of equivalent impersonality, in the name of what Nietzsche with disdain prophesied as “the new idol, the State,” bodes well, largely with American aid, to represent the future of man of the next millennium. For as Aldous Huxley stated in the 1946 Foreword to his Utopian novel Brave New World: “Without economic security, the love of servitude cannot possibly come into existence.”^{Note 28} And as Nicolas Berdiaeff states in the passage quoted by Huxley on the motto-page of that volume:

Les utopies apparaissent comme bien plus réalisables qu’on ne le croyait autrefois. Et nous nous trouvons actuellement devant une question bien autrement angoissante: Comment éviter leur réalisation définitive?… Les utopies sont réalisables. Le vie marche vers les utopies. Et peut-être un siècle nouveau commence-t-il, un siècle où les intellectuels et la classe cultivée rêveront aux moyens d’éviter les utopies et de retourner à une société non utopique, moins “parfaite” et plus libre.

III. Erotic Irony

In The Magic Mountain, the novel composed by its author in a period of perfectly achieved balance at the noon of his career, there is a pair of now famous political chatterboxes, Settembrini and Naphta, whose amusingly counterpoised, ultimately self-defeating arguments form a substantial portion of the work. The setting is again, as in the author’s youthful “Tristan,” a mountain sanatorium, to which an undistinguished German civilian comes for a brief stay: in the present instance a young engineer, Hans Castorp, for a three-week holiday visit with his afflicted cousin, a youthful army officer, Joachim Ziemssen, who, in spite of the healthy look of his tan, is seriously ill. The steep train ride up the mountain is described as a thrilling passage from the flatland of our normal, banal duties in life to a sphere of timeless rest, above the range of deciduous trees, where silent peaks, everlasting snows, and evergreens speak of eternity; and, as the literary man Settembrini tells the young voyager days later, in that ascent he had passed from the land of the living to the land of the dead. He had gone not upward but actually downward, to the netherworld: he was in danger and, before tasting of its fruit, had better leave.

There is a passage in Mann’s Reflections of a Non-Political Man, telling of the conception of this novel, which apparently had been incubating for years. “Before the war,” it states,

I had begun to write a brief novel, a sort of pedagogical fable, in which a young man, trapped in a morally dangerous resort, to which he had come for a brief stay, was to be placed between two equally ludicrous educators, an Italian litterateur, humanist, rhetorician and progressive, and on the other side a rather disreputable mystic, reactionary, and advocate of anti-reason: the innocent young man was to be forced to choose between the powers of virtue and seduction, the duties and service of life and the fascination of corruption — to which latter he was not to have been unsusceptible. And in this work an important thematic element of the composition was to have been the phrase: “Sympathy with Death.”^{Note 29}

Not only in The Magic Mountain, but already in his “Tristan,” as well as in the first of his novels, Buddenbrooks, that theme is fundamental; and in a volume of his essays published in 1925, in a paper “On the Spirit of Medicine,” he has rendered an elucidation and moral as well as social evaluation of the force and import of that sentiment.

“My novel, The Magic Mountain, presents in its foreground a social-critical aspect,” he there states,

and since the foreground of this foreground is a medical environment, namely the setting of a de luxe Alpine sanatorium in which the capitalistic society of pre-war Europe is mirrored, it was of course inevitable that certain professionally specialized critics, hypnotized by the foremost foreground, should have been able to see nothing in the book but a novel about a tuberculosis sanatorium, and that these then should have been afraid lest its effect should be that of a sensational exposé — a kind of medical counterpart of Upton Sinclair’s Chicago stockyard exposure. That, however, was an ironic misunderstanding indeed. For social criticism — as the company of the literary critics well knows — is not one of my passions; nor is it one of my strong points. It enters my works only accidentally and incidentally, taken in only by the way. The real motivations of my authorship are of a sinfully individualistic, that is to say, metaphysical, moral, pedagogical, in short, innerworldly kind; and as in my other works, so too in The Magic Mountain.…

The book owes its success, in the first place, to what Dr. Margarethe Levy of Berlin has, without professional prejudice, called the lifelikeness and vitality of its characters. And it owes its success, in the second place, to its spiritual themes and problems, which are such that fifteen years ago in Germany would not have tempted a dog from the stove, but today, thanks to the uprooting experiences of our time, are at the tips of everyone’s fingers. It does not owe its success to the thrills of any scandalous revelations of the “inside life” in Alpine sanatoriums.

Among these themes and problems there is what one critic has called the web of ideas about life and death, health and disease — and I am permitting myself to speak of this because a critic of mine in The Munich Medical Weekly has complained that I have painted an Inferno, which, in contrast to that of my great medieval predecessor, lacks all ethical pathos. Amazing! A number of my literary critics have impatiently advised me finally to get back to my art, instead of lashing around any longer with the ethical problems of mankind — and now this doctor can see nothing but cold-blooded artistic cruelty in the work. He accuses me of a lack of respect and sympathy for ailing life, a repulsive want of that “Christian reverence for suffering” of which [the book’s heroine] Frau Chauchat speaks: and he is apparently completely unaware that the attitude he thus stigmatizes could not possibly have accommodated the actual (though admittedly not too obvious) “ethical pathos” of the work. Which again is strange! The whole educational process through which the young hero of my story passes, this medical reader has missed: he remains untouched. For it is a correcting process, the process of the progressive disillusionment of a pious, death-revering young man concerning sickness and death. My critic disapproves of this course of education and its means — and, finally, how could he not! Has it often happened in literature or in art — has it ever happened — that death has been turned into a comic figure? In any case, here it has. For this book, which has the ambition to be a European book, is a book of good will and decision, a book of ideal renunciation of much that is beloved, many dangerous sympathies, enchantments, and seductions to which the European soul has been and is disposed and which, all in all, has only one piously majestic name — a book of departure, I say, and pedagogical self-discipline; its service is to life, its will is to health, its goal is the future. And in that it is a work of healing. For to that variety of humanistic science known as medicine, no matter how profoundly its studies may pertain to sickness and death, the goal remains health and humanity; its goal remains the restoration of the human idea in its purity.

Death as a comical figure.… Does it play only this role in my novel? Does it not show in this role two faces, the one laughable, the other grave? Schopenhauer has said that without death on earth there could scarcely be philosophy. Also, there could hardly be any “education” on earth without it. Death and disease are not at all just romantic caricatures in my novel: — I have been unjustly accused. They are there also as great teachers, great leaders toward humanity, and the opinion of the contributor to The Munich Medical Weekly that my intention, my reprehensible, defamatory intention had obviously been “to show that in the environment of a tuberculosis sanatorium the character of a young, honorable, and well brought up young man must necessarily degenerate” — this opinion is refuted to the ground by the book itself. Did Hans Castorp degenerate? Did he go under? He in fact improved! This “environment” is actually the hermetic retort in which his simple primary material is forcibly sublimated and purified to an unsuspected ennoblement. In this “environment,” which has been said to be defamed in the book, its modest hero is brought to think about things and matured to a sense of duty to his government in a way that in the “flatland” (and do we not have an ear for the ironic appraisal sounded in that word?) he would never have attained in his whole life.

“The Standard Dialogue of Disease,” someone has called my book — not exactly in the way of praise, but I accept the judgment. The disreputable aspect of disease is brought out in relation to the ideal; but it is represented also as a mighty medium of knowledge and as the “genial” way to humanity and to love. Through disease and death, through the fervid study of the organic, through a medical experience, that is to say, I let my hero attain, as far as this was possible to his shrewd simplicity, to a premonition of a new humanity. And in doing this I am supposed to have maligned medicine and the medical profession?^{Note 30}

The novel is much too rich in life and in closely interwoven ideas to be summarized, or even adequately suggested; however, it is such an important and illuminating landmark in the field of mythological research, not only representing the passage of a modern man, stage by stage, through initiations in effect equivalent to those of the ancient mysteries, but also revealing the analogues of ancient mythic themes in the imageries of modern science, that an attempt to mark the main course of its hero’s development from health, through sickness, to a higher health is not to be avoided.

The book appeared two years after Ulysses. The two masterworks were conceived and realized independently, yet were dealing with equivalent problems in equivalent — though contrasting — terms. For in both the novelistic foreground is so contrived that, throughout, mythological themes echo and appear, re-echo and reappear, in such a way as to suggest that in our lives today, largely unrecognized yet present, the archetypes of mythic revelation are manifest and operative still. Schopenhauer’s figure of the anamorphoscope can here be applied again. Chance occurrences scattered through a lifetime, when viewed reflected in a mythic form, come together and show an order in depth that is the order of man everlasting; and to effect such ideated epiphanies, where to the unassisted eye only disconnected fragments would appear, both Joyce and Mann have employed the rhetorical device of the Leitmotiv, the recurrent verbal constellation, to bring together apparently unrelated, widely separated occurrences, persons, settings, and experiences. Apparently independently, inspired each by the art of music — Mann admittedly by Wagner, Joyce possibly as well — these two authors of remarkably parallel courses and aims made use of recurrent verbal figures to lead the mind not only from point to point of the narrative, but also, and more significantly, backward, downward, into depths that in both cases proved (as in Wagner) to be of mythic mysteries: myth conceived as referring, not as in archaic times and orthodox religious life, directly to supernatural beings and miraculous occasions, but as in poetry and depth psychology, symbolically, to the root and seed potentials, structuring laws and forces, interior to the earthly being that is man.

The Leitmotiv appears already in Homer in an elementary way in the epic epithet: “wine-dark sea,” “rosy-fingered dawn,” and so forth. In Mann’s first novel, Buddenbrooks, it is an immediately recognizable coordinating device, employed principally to maintain the sense of a continuity of character through all the acts, decisions, and appearances of each of the numerous personages of the work; but serving also to establish and develop certain thematic continuities and contrasts: for instance, the call and demands of duty represented to all true Buddenbrooks by the name of the family firm, and the opposition to this sobering family summons represented by the romantic call to the individual of the sea — romance — music — dream — and then sleep — metaphysics — death. In Joyce’s Portrait (the first draft of which was finished in the year of Mann’s short story “Tonio Kröger," 1903), a like building up of continuities and of counterpoised thematic aggregates through verbal echoes and refrains can be recognized; and in that case many of the motives announced were to be carried on systematically to Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. In his short story “Tonio Kröger,” however, Mann developed his use of the Leitmotiv in a new, symphonic, musical way (a “prose ballad,” he himself called the work);^{Note 31} for in contrast to the novel Buddenbrooks, where a comparatively simple, sequential, epic technique of repetition had been used ( the firm — the firm — the firm, against a cumulative aggregation of counterthemes: the sea — music — romance — dream and sleep — metaphysics — disengagement — death), there is in this short story a musical development and unfolding of the range of associations of each of the motifs at each of its restatements. For example:

The title of the work and the hero’s name, “Tonio Kröger,” already suggests a dichotomy: from the father’s side, northern blood, and from the mother’s, Mediterranean. Among the blue-eyed blonds of his school, Tonio is dark-haired and dark-eyed, and the inward dissonance thus socially evident is again complemented inwardly by the love, yearning, and envy, mingled with a certain strain of contempt, that Tonio feels for his companions. For, inheriting his mother’s emotional temperament, he is more complex than they, indrawn, moody, and susceptible: to the beauty of the walnut tree and the fountain, the comely blue-eyed girls and boys themselves, to music and the sea, to solitude, and to experiences and readings of his own — such as of Schiller’s Don Carlos, where he finds a counterpart of his own complicated case. At parties he is inept, and the girls spontaneously drawn to him are those who fall down when they dance; the lovely, competent, blue-eyed blondes do not sense and respond to his deeper strain. And now the ranges of association of these announced motives expand. Tonio is neglecting assigned schoolwork in favor of his own findings, and his grades consequently are suffering. His blue-eyed father is angry, his dark mother, however, indifferent: she has a temperament for disorder, which Tonio recognizes in himself. “What is the matter with me?” he muses. “We are not gypsies in a green wagon, but decent folk.” The gypsy-in-a-greenwagon motif, now joining those of dark eyes and hair, sensibility, and detachment, adds connotations of adventure, freedom, and disgrace, while the blue-eyed-blond theme acquires, in contrast, the dignity of responsible respectability, social engagement, and worth. Tonio departs to be a writer, and the final stand of the motifs is that of the letter, already cited, that he writes to Lisabeta Ivanovna: of the world of art and letters against life and the simple heart, and with Tonio Kröger between.

“Whereas in Buddenbrooks,” wrote the author himself in his wartime book of reflections,

only the influence of Schopenhauer and Wagner, the pessimistic ethical vein, the musical and the epical, found expression, in ‘Tonio Kröger’ the Nietzschean, pedagogical, life-fostering factor broke through that was to remain predominant in my later works. In the experience and feeling that inspired this novelette, the lyric philosopher Nietzsche’s conservative dithyrambic conception of life, and his defense of this against the moralizing nihilistic spirit, became transformed into erotic irony: a loving affirmation of all that is not intellectuality and art, but is innocent, healthy, decently unproblematical and untouched by spirituality. The name of Life, yea of Beauty, is attributed in this work (sentimentally, it is true) to the world of burgher living (Bürgerlichkeit), normality recognized as blessed, the antithesis of intellectuality and art.

And no wonder this appealed to the younger generation! For if “life” came off well here, the “spirit” came off still better, since it was this that was the lover, and “the god” is in the one who loves, not the beloved — which is something the “spirit” in this case well knew. W hat it did not yet know, or for the time being was leaving aside, however, was the fact that not only does the spirit yearn toward life, but also life yearns toward the spirit, and that the requirement of life for salvation, its yearning, its sense of beauty (for beauty is nothing but yearning) is perhaps more serious, perhaps more “godly,” perhaps less arrogant, less haughty, than that of the spirit.

But irony is always irony in both directions, something in the middle, a neither-nor and a both-and: as, indeed, Tonio Kröger pictured himself — as something ironically in the middle, between burgher life and life in art. In fact, his name itself is already a symbol for all kinds of problematical mixtures: not only that of Latin and German blood, but also those of the middle ground between health and sophistication, respectability and adventurousness, heart and temperament. The name thus suggests the pathos of a dual position, which again is obviously influenced by Nietzsche, who declared that the clarifying force of his philosophy resulted from the fact that he was at home in the two worlds, of the decadence and of health. He stood, as he declared, between the setting and the rising. The whole of my story was a melange of elements apparently incompatible: melancholy and criticism, inwardness and skepticism, Theodor Storm and Nietzsche, mood and intellectuality.… No wonder, as I say, that the younger generation went for this and preferred these mere ninety pages to the two thick volumes of the Buddenbrooks.^{Note 32}

Erotic irony, then, or, as Mann also frequently termed it, plastic irony, is the key to the aesthetic posture of his scriptural revelation. It is the posture of an artist not afraid to see what is before him in its truth, its frailty, its inadequacy to the ideal, and whose heart then goes out to it in affirmation of this frailty, as of its life. For it is according to its imperfection that each existence moves, acts, and becomes, perfection being not of this earth. Consequently, it is in naming its imperfection that the artist gives to each its life, its possibility; and this, be it said, is a cruel act — though with ironic result.

The look that one directs at things, both outward and inward, as an artist [our author states], is not the same as that with which one would regard the same as a man, but at once colder and more passionate. As a man, you might be well-disposed, patient, loving, positive, and have a wholly uncritical inclination to look upon everything as all right: but as artist, your daemon constrains you to “observe” : to take note, lightning fast and with hurtful malice, of every detail that in the literary sense would be characteristic, distinctive, significant, opening insights, typifying the race, the social or the psychological mode; recording all as mercilessly as though you had no human relationship to the observed object whatsoever — and in the “work,” then, everything comes to light.…

But besides this split between the artist and the human being, which can lead to the most serious outer and inner conflicts, there is still another factor, it seems to me, on which the art of authorship rests: a painful sensibility, of which the expression and manifestation is a “critical force” or “cogency” in expression that I have found to be a source of misunderstanding. That is to say, it is not to be supposed that the refinement and alertness of the faculties of observation can be sharpened to an exceptional degree without having one’s susceptibility to pain sharpened as well. And there is a degree in such susceptibility that turns every experience into an affliction. But the only weapon given to the artist, with which to react to such things and experiences, and to protect himself in his own fashion, is that of expression, his power of denoting; and this reaction to things by expressing himself about them with psychological destructiveness, which is the sublime revenge of the artist on his experiences, will be the more violent, the greater the sensibility of the center the experience has touched. This is the origin of that cold and merciless accuracy in description: this, the tensely drawn bow from which the word flies, the sharp, feathered word, that whirs and hits and lodges quivering in its mark. — And the stern bow: is it not, as well as the gentle lyre, an instrument of Apollo? [Figure 60] — Nothing would be farther from the secret of art than the idea that coldness and passion exclude each other! Nothing more mistaken than to conclude that critical force and cogency of expression are derived from malice and animosity — in the human sense!… The accurate expression always seems spiteful. The right word hurts.^{Note 33}

So far, so good; we have read, and we have heard: the artist, always a little sorry for himself, has experiences with pain and replies with the arrow of a word, well made, well aimed. But to what end? To kill?

The author has more to say:

The intellectual, the spiritual man has the choice (to this extent he can choose) to work either with ironic or with radical effect: a third possibility is not decently possible. And what he manages to make of himself in this regard depends on the final point of his argument. It hangs on the question as to which of the two arguments seems to him the final, decisive, absolute one: that of Life, or that of the Spirit (the Spirit as Truth, or as Righteousness, or as Purity). For the Radical, life is no argument. Fiat justitia, or veritas or libertas, fiat spiritus — pereat mundus et vita! So speaks every form of radicalism. And on the other hand: “Is then Truth an argument — when the question is Life?” This question is the formula of irony.

Radicalism is nihilism. The ironic mood is conservative. A conservatism is only then ironic, however, when it does not represent the voice of life speaking for itself, but the voice of the spirit, speaking not for itself, but for life.

Here it is Eros that is in play. This love has been characterized as “the affirmation of an individual, regardless of his worth.” Now that surely is not a very spiritual, not a very moral affirmation, and indeed, the affirmation of life by the spirit is not moral either. It is ironic. Eros ever was ironic. And irony is erotic…

And this is what makes art so worth our love and worth our practice, this wonderful contradiction, that it is — or at least can be — simultaneously a refreshment and a judgment, a celebration and reward of life through its delightful imitation, and at the same time, a morally critical annihilation of life; that its effect is in equal degree an awakening of delight and of conscience. The boon of art proceeds from the circumstance (to use diplomatic terms) that it maintains equally good relationships to life and to pure spirit, that it is simultaneously conservative and radical; from the circumstance, that is to say, of its mediate and mediating place between spirit and life. Which is the place of the source of irony itself.^{Note 34}

Mann’s first formulation of this ironic principle appeared, as we have seen, in “Tonio Kröger” (1903), immediately after completion of his “Tristan” (1902), and thereby opened the way for him to a mode of thought and feeling that should carry his craft between the Scylla and Charybdis of the hard sheer rock of “truth,” on one hand, “perfection,” “justice,” “judgment,” and “release from the prison of this flesh,” and on the other, the vortex of involvement in the spirit-killing toils, banalities, lies, cheatings, and blind passions of mere life for life: an answer, in other words, to the basic Tristan problem, as he saw it, of exclusivism, aesthetic snobbism, retreat from the fields of common life, and, as he termed it, “sympathy with death.” The medieval poet Gottfried’s high disdain for those “who are unable to endure sorrow and wish only to revel in bliss” was here explicitly renounced, and a mode of seeing and feeling proposed that should view with equal eye and loving heart both the noble and the base, the wicked and the just, transmuting all, through its art, its alchemy, into “gold.”

However, if we may be honest here for a moment — and not again, immediately, ironic — this transmutation, to be realized, must include all those whom we fear and hate, as well as those whom we merely despise: the monsters, sadists, beasts, and degenerates of our kind, in the all-embracing spirit of Christ’s own fundamental word, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy,’ but I say to you, Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.”^{Note 35} And again: “Judge not, that you may not be judged.”^{Note 36} Or in the spirit of the Buddhist axiom: “All things are buddha-things.”^{Note 37} And indeed, Mann himself has said of his undiscriminating eros — which in his definition, finally, is indistinguishable from the indiscriminate agapē of which we have already heard — that in its “affirmation of an individual, regardless of his worth,” it is “not a very spiritual, not a very moral affirmation.”

This presents us with a multileveled, many-headed problem.

First, there is that which Mann recognized when he distinguished between the writer as artist and the writer as mere human being. As an artist, the writer must be cruel and merciless in observation, even with pain to himself, and yet as a human being may be gentle, cordial and unassuming; or, as we now have also learned, as an artist he must be all-loving (in his own way), all-understanding, and yet, as a mere man, may still be capable of righteousness and even the use of brute force — as we hear, indeed, of Christ himself in that instance of the money-changers in the temple. Thomas Mann returned to his own secular mode in his self-exile from Hitler’s Reich and his address, then, from the yonder shore — with the disembodied voice, as it were, of the ghost of one they once knew — to the German people still entrapped in the māyā of European history. And there is room here for irony all round.

For no one in the history of thought has yet proposed a formula sufficient to eradicate that “beveled edge” of phoenix fire where the spiritual and the earthly, metaphysical and moral planes intersect: the line or point of meeting symbolized in the bed (the sweet-bitter altar) of the Cross. Not the voice of the spirit speaking for itself, but the voice of the spirit speaking for life: that is the self-crucifixion of the spirit (“who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men: and being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross”).^{Note 38} And on the other side: “Not the voice of life speaking for life, but the yearning of life toward the spirit”; which is the self-crucifixion of life (as again in Paul: “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”).^{Note 39} To all of which there is the corollary that “irony is always irony in both directions, something in the middle, a neither-nor and a both-and” — which last is a phrase that comes marvelously close to sounding like an aphorism of the Mahāyāna Buddhist teaching of the Middle Way, where compassion (karuṇā) is a function of the realization that all these suffering beings are no-beings, but spirit, which neither is nor is not.^{Note 40} “When it is seen that all form is no form, the Buddha is recognized.”^{Note 41} “It cannot be called either void or not void, or both or neither.”^{Note 42}

The artist lives thus in two worlds — as do we all; but he, in so far as he knows what he is doing, in a special state of consciousness of this micromacrocosmic crucifixion that is life on earth and is perhaps, also, the fire of the sun, stars, and galaxies beyond.

Which, however, is not all he has to endure. For in his special sphere of irony there is another confrontation of opposites to be resolved in the imbroglio of eros, agapē, and amor: the first two, as we have seen, being religious in the Dionysian-Orphic, Gnostic-Christian ways of indiscriminate, all-embracing love, whereas amor is aristocratic, discriminatory, and aesthetic: as defined in the literature of the troubadours, by the Minnesingers, and by Gottfried, an experience of the “noble heart” and its scouts, the eyes. But if the truth is to be told here again, as it was, I believe, in “Tonio Kröger,” it was actually Tonio’s noble heart’s commitment aesthetically to the pert little commonplace blue-eyed Ingeborg Holm (who did not fall down when she danced and so had no sense of his own soul’s need) that had locked him in a sort of troubadour’s lifetime of vassalage in poet’s service to the general face of those simple folk (less simple, however, than he thought they were) of this fair world — whom it is even God’s whole privilege and function to love, to forgive, and to woo.

See again both Romans 11:32 and Figure 10.

IV. Identity and Relationship

In the art of Thomas Mann, the principle of rapture (eros-agapē)is represented — following Nietzsche’s designation of music, the dance, and lyric poetry as the arts specific to the Dionysian mode — through the author’s craftsmanly concern for the musical effects of his prose, its rhythms, verbal tones, and spheres of emotional association, as well as through his masterly employment of the Leitmotiv. And on the other side, the side of the claims of the unique, ephemeral, induplicable moment, sentiment, or individual — the side of the principle of individuation (principium individuationis), which Nietzsche assigned to Apollo as the lord of light and to the arts of sculpture and epic poetry — Mann served in the merciless accuracy of his almost incredibly alive, descriptive style. The work of Nietzsche that most profoundly influenced him in his fashioning of this style, and even came in The Magic Mountain to a sort of novelized restatement, was the philosopher’s youthful manifesto, The Birth of Tragedy (1872).

“A great deal will have been won for the science of aesthetics,” Nietzsche wrote in the opening, key passage of this work, “when we shall have succeeded in not merely recognizing intellectually, but directly and clearly seeing, that the development of art depends on the dual influence of Apollonian and Dionysian forces — as reproduction depends on the sexes, in their unrelenting conflict and only occasional — periodic — reconciliation.”

That is the basic, germinal idea. We come now to its elucidation, the powers in question being those of Figure 3, at Stations 16 and 10.

I have borrowed these two names [Nietzsche explains] from the Greeks, who interpreted the profound mysteries of their doctrines of art to those of adequate understanding, not in conceptual terms, but through the eloquently impressive figures of their pantheon. Hence it is through their two divinities of art, Apollo and Dionysus, that we are led to recognize that in the Greek world there existed a great division, with respect to both source and aim, between the art of the sculptor, Apollonian art, and the non-pictorial art, music, of Dionysus. The two impulses, different as they are, were carried along side by side, generally in open opposition, provoking each other to ever new, more mighty births through which to perpetuate the war of a pair of opposites that the shared word “art” only apparently over-bridges; until at last, through a metaphysical miracle of the Hellenic “will,” the two were united, and in that pairing generated the art that was as Dionysian as Apollonian: Attic tragedy.^{Note 43}

Nietzsche describes next, in contrast, the opposed powers and features of these two divine domains.

To familiarize ourselves more closely with these two forces, let us begin, [he suggests] by regarding them as the separate art worlds of dream and intoxication, between which physiological phenomena an opposition is to be remarked that is analogous to that between the Apollonian and Dionysian spheres. It was in dream, according to Lucretius, that the forms of the gods appeared before the souls of men; in dream the great sculptor saw the enchanting bodily forms of supernatural beings; and if the Hellenic poet had been asked concerning the secret of poetic inspiration, he too would have referred to dream, and proposed a doctrine like that of Hans Sachs in The Meistersinger:

My friend, this is the poet’s task,

His dreams to mark, their sense to ask

Man’s truest rapture, so I teach,

In dream is opened to his speech.

All poetic inspiration

Is but dream interpretation.

The fair illusion of the world of dream, in whose creation everyone is a finished artist, is the precondition of all visual art and, as we shall see, of an important half of poetry as well. We enjoy in dream a direct comprehension of form, every figure speaks to us, there is nothing indifferent or superfluous. And even in moments of the greatest vividness of this dream-reality, we have nevertheless the prevading sense of its illusion: or that, at least, has been my experience, for the frequency, indeed normality, of which I could offer considerable evidence, and the statements of the poets besides. Moreover, the philosophical mind even has a premonition that beneath this other reality, also, in which we live and have our being, a second, quite different, lies concealed; in other words, that this too is an illusion: and Schopenhauer even designates as the true sign of the philosophical talent, just this susceptibility to the impression, at times, of people and all things as an imagery of dream. And now, much as the philosopher relates himself to the reality of existence, so the artistically sensitive man to the reality of dream: he observes it closely and with pjeasure, since it is from these images that he interprets life, and on these that he prepares for life. Nor is it only the pleasant and favorable images that he experiences this way, with ready understanding, but the austere, turbid, sorrowful, and dark, as well: abrupt frustrations, the taunts of chance, frightful expectations, in short, the entire “divine comedy” of life, along with its inferno, passes before him: not simply as a shadow play — for he lives and suffers in these scenes — yet not without that ineffable sense, either, of illusion. And there may be others who, like myself, in the very midst of the perils and terrors of a dream have reassured themselves by crying: “It is a dream! I want it to go on!” Also, I have heard tell of those who have been able to keep the circumstances of one and the same dream going on through a course of three or more successive nights. These are facts which clearly testify that our innermost being, the common ground of us all, experiences dream with deep delight and a joyous sense of its necessity.

And this sense of joyous necessity in the experience of dream is what the Greeks likewise expressed in their Apollo. Apollo is the god of all visioning powers and at the same time the soothsaying god. He who at root is the “appearing” one, the divinity of light, is the lord also of the fair “appearance” of the inward world of fantasy. The higher sense of validity, the wholeness, of these conditions, in contrast to the incompletely comprehensible realities of day, taken together with the deep consciousness of the healing and helping powers of Nature in sleep and dream, is symbolically analogous to the prophetic faculty and in general to the arts, through which life is made possible and worth living. But then also, that thin line which the dream image must not cross, if it is not to work pathologically, in which case the appearance would deceive us and be taken for crude reality: that line of limitation, that freedom from the more uncontrolled emotions, that wisdom-filled repose of the sculptor’s god, the image of Apollo itself must also honor. His eye must be “sunlike,” in accord with his origin: even when its glance is wrathful and incensed, there dwells in it the benison of the fair illusion. Hence, of Apollo one can say, in an eccentric way, what Schopenhauer, in Book One of The World as Will and Idea, says of mankind caught in the net of māyā: “As on a raging sea, where, limitless in all directions, roaring mountains of water rise and fall, a boatman sits in his skiff with trust in the fragile craft, so in the midst of a world of torments, the individual calmly sits, supported and trusting, upon the principium individuationis.” Yes, it can be said of Apollo that in him the unshaken trust in that principium, and the calm repose in it of the being entrapped in it, have received their most sublime expression; and one might even designate Apollo as the glorious divine image of the principium individuationis itself, in whose gestures and glances the whole delight and wisdom of the “world illusion” speaks to us, together with its beauty.

But in the same passage Schopenhauer has pictured to us the monstrous horror (das ungeheure Grausen) that takes hold of the individual when he suddenly finds himself in error with respect to his interpretation of the forms of appearance — which is what occurs when the logic of causality, in one or another of its laws, seems to have been fractured by an exception. And if we now add to this horror the rapturous transport that rises from the innermost ground of the individual, yea from the ground of Nature itself, at that shattering of the principium individuationis, we shall gain an insight into the essence of that Dionysian state, to which we are brought closest by the analogy of intoxication. Through the influence either of those narcotic potions to which all primitive men and peoples give praise in hymns, or of the mighty approach of spring, suffusing delightfully all of Nature, those Dionysian motions awake that, when heightened, erase all sense of individuality in self-forgetfulness. In the German Middle Ages, under the influence of just such a Dionysian force, ever-growing hordes, singing and dancing, were sent swarming from place to place. In these St. John’s and St. Vitus’ dancers we recognize again the Bacchic choruses of the Greeks, with their predecessors in Asia Minor and on back to Babylon, the orgiastic Scythians as well. There are those who, either from lack of experience or from dullness of wit, turn away from such phenomena with mockery or pity and a feeling of their own health, as from “endemic diseases” : poor chaps! they have no idea how corpse-pale and ghostly this very “health” of theirs appears when the glowing life of the Dionysian revel swarms past them.

Under the magic of the Dionysian force, not only does the bond between man and man again close together, but alienated, hostile, or suppressed Nature celebrates her festival of reconciliation with her lost son, man. Freely, of herself, the earth bestows her boons, and, ready for peace, the beasts of prey, of the rocks and deserts, draw nigh. [Figure 3.] With flowers and garlands is the car all strewn of Dionysus: in its span stride panther and tiger. Turn Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” into a painting and fill it with everything you can imagine, where the millions, in awe, sink prostrate to the dust: that is the way to arrive at some notion of the Dionysian. Now the slave is a free man, now all those hard, hostile boundaries shatter that misery, willfulness, or “insolent custom” have set up between man and man. Now each, in the Gospel of World Harmony, feels himself to be not only united with his neighbor, reconciled and blended, but one — as though the veil of māyā had been rent apart and now only fluttered in shreds around the mysterious primordial One. Mankind, singing, dancing, professes itself to be a member of a higher commonalty. It has forgotten how to walk and speak, on the point of flying, in dance, into the air. Enchantment speaks through all its gestures. And as now the animals talk and the earth yields milk and honey, so there resounds through all of this, something supernatural. One feels oneself to be a god and now strides in the same enraptured and exalted way as the gods in dream were seen to stride. The man now is no longer an artist, but himself a work of art. The art power of all Nature here is manifesting itself in the thrill of intoxication, to the supremely rapturous satisfaction of the primordial One. The noblest clay, the most precious marble, namely man, is here kneaded and hewn; and to chisel blows of the Dionysian world-artist, the cry is heard sounding of the Eleusinian mysteries: “Are you prostrating yourselves, you millions? Do you not mark your creator, the World?”^{Note 44}

Taken for granted in this philosophy, as also in that of Schopenhauer and in the operatic world of the young Nietzsche’s adored friend Wagner, is the Kantian concept of all phenomenality as conditioned, through and through, by the organs through which it is perceived — whether eyes be open, as by day, or shut, by night. (Compare, in Figure 5, the dreamer, at the goddess’s feet.) Also accepted is the recognition, which Schopenhauer seems to have been the first to have realized, of this Kantian concept of the a priori forms of sensibility and categories of logic as practically identical with the Hindu-Buddhist philosophy of māyā,^{Note 45} And accordingly, as Viṣṇu is the lord of māyā, the god whose dream is the universe and in whom (as all figures in a dream are actually but functions of the energy of the dreamer) all things, all beings, of this māyā-world are but refractions of the one substance, so also, in Hellenic mythology, is Apollo. Comparatively viewed, both as to character and as to sense, the classical Apollo, as interpreted by Nietzsche, and the Indian god Viṣṇu as Narayana, floating on the Cosmic Sea, dreaming the lotus-dream of the universe, are the same. And James Joyce also, in Ulysses, takes this transcendental philosophy for his base; so that in the Sandymount chapter, where Stephen Dedalus strolls brooding by the sea, the very terms of Schopenhauer appear in designation of the conditioning a priori forms of sensibility; i.e. the Nebeneinander (the field of things “beside each other”), namely Space; and the Nacheinander (“after each other”), Time:^{Note 46} following which, and still in Schopenhauer’s vein, Joyce treats of the principle of causality, the chain of cause and effect, in the amusing image of a telephone line of navel cords linking all of us back to Edenville, each with his own navel as the phone mouthpiece by which he might communicate with his first cause: “The cords of all link back…” so we read: “strandentwining cable of all flesh. That is why mystic monks. Will you be as gods? Gaze in your omphalos. Hello. Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one. — Spouse and helpmate of Adam Kadmon: Heva, naked Eve. She had no navel.”^{Note 47} The aim of this brooding hero, as we have seen, was to penetrate that threefold veil of Space (the Nebeneinander), Time (the Nacheinander), and Cause-Effect (the Satz vom Grunde), and so to come to the “Father,” “Drowned Man,” “Finn-again” (the Irish word fionn, meaning “light” ), who is lost to view in the deep, dark “adiaphane”: beyond and within the “diaphane” of this limitless mothering sea of forms, rising, falling, roaring all around us, like waves.

Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), in his Prolegomena to Every Future System of Metaphysics that May Ever Arise in the Way of a Science (1783) supplies an extraordinarily simple formula for the metaphysical or mystical interpretation not only of mythic metaphors, but also of the phenomenal world itself from which such metaphors derive, the world of empirical fact, and the world of dream as well. What he offers is a four-term analogy, a is to b as c is to x, which is to be interpreted as pointing not to an incomplete resemblance of two things, but to a complete resemblance of two relationships between quite dissimilar things (”nicht etwa, eine unvollkommene Ähnlichkeit zweier Dinge, sondern eine vollkommene Ähnlichkeit zweier Verhältnisse zwischen ganz unähnlichen Dingen”): not “a somewhat resembles b,” but “the relationship of a to b perfectly resembles that of c to x,” where x represents a quantity that is not only unknown but absolutely unknowable — which is to say, metaphysical.

Kant demonstrates this formula in two examples:

1. As the promotion of the happiness of the children (a) is related to the parents’ love (b), so is the welfare of the human race (c) to that unknown in God (x) which we call God’s love.
2. The causality of the highest cause (x) is precisely, in respect to the world (c), what human reason (b) is in respect to the work of human art (a).

He then discusses the implication of the second of these examples, as follows:

Herewith the nature of the highest cause itself remains unknown to me, I only compare its known effect (namely, the constitution of the universe) and the rationality of this effect with the known effects of human reason, and therefore I call that highest cause a Reason, without thereby attributing to it as its proper quality, either the thing that I understand by this term in the case of man, or any other thing with which I am familiar.^{Note 48}

Mythological, theological, metaphysical analogies, in other words, do not point indirectly to an only partially understood “metaphysical” term (God, brahman, ātman, the Self, the Absolute, for example), but directly to a relationship between two terms, the one empirical, the other metaphysical; the latter being absolutely and forever and from every conceivable human standpoint, unknowable: unconditioned as it is by Time, Space, Causality, and the categories of logic — and to such a degree that even to speak of it as unconditioned is to represent, and so to misrepresent, it, which cannot be represented and is no which. It is evident that Kant’s metaphysical Ding-an-sich, therefore, is equivalent (as far as it goes) to the brahman of the Upaniṣads, the Void (śunyata) of the Buddhists, and the “Nameless” of the Tao Te Ching.

To which Schopenhauer added the complementary insight (which completed the Oriental equivalence) that that which is thus absolutely and forever and from every conceivable human standpoint unknowable as the metaphysical ground of all things is accordingly, inevitably, the ground of being of each one of us, and so our very self; and by analogy, as the figures of your dream (a) are to you (b), so are the forms and creatures of this world (c), to that unknown (x) who, as Apollo-Viṣṇu, is called the dreamer of the world illusion.

“Life,” Schopenhauer wrote in his paper already cited, “On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual,” “has long been recognized and often declared to resemble dream. And indeed, this comparison with dream permits us to perceive, even if only as at a misty distance, how the hidden power that directs and moves us toward its intended goals by means of the outward circumstances affecting us, might yet have its roots within the very depths of our own unfathomable being.”

Schopenhauer is here continuing the argument, as the reader no doubt has surmised, concerning the problem announced in his title of this piece: of the curious sense that occasionally comes to one, of an intention behind those apparently chance events by which one’s life has been shaped — and in certain lights even appears to have been shaped by highly conscious art, as by the plan of a creative author.

For in dreams too [he now goes on to suggest] the circumstances that motivate our acts seem to befall us from without, as independent, often repulsive, completely accidental occurrences, and yet there is a concealed, purposeful continuity throughout: for there is a hidden power, to which all those accidents of the dream conform, which is actually directing and coordinating its incidents — and always with exclusive reference to ourselves. But the most extraordinary thing is this: that this hidden power can finally be nothing other than our own will — operating from a standpoint, however, that is not embraced in the horizon of our dreaming consciousness. That is why it happens that the occurrences in our dreams so often go completely against the wishes of which we are aware in our dreams; surprise, depress, and even frighten us nearly to death; while the dream-fate that we ourselves are covertly directing sends us neither rescuer nor relief. Or, comparably: we inquire eagerly about something, and receive an answer that sets us in amazement. Or again: we ourselves are being questioned, as though in an examination, and are unable to find the reply, whereupon another, to our humiliation, answers perfectly. And in both of these cases the answer can have come only from our own resources.

To clarify this mysterious guidance of dream events by the dreamer himself, and to bring it a little closer to our understanding, there is still another available illustration; but it will be unavoidably obscene, and so I must presuppose that a reader worthy of my writing for him will neither take offence, nor consider merely the comical aspect of the matter. As is well known, certain dreams serve a material function, namely of emptying the overfilled seminal glands. Dreams of this kind, naturally enough, present indecent scenes; but other dreams, too, present indecent scenes without serving the same material function. Here, then, we find that in the first sort of dream opportunity and the desired object favor the dreamer and nature has its way, whereas in dreams of the other sort, on the contrary, all kinds of obstacles intervene between ourselves and the object so eagerly desired. We strive and strive again to overcome them, without success, and the goal is never attained. — But now, the power that is erecting these obstacles, rendering all our dearest wishes futile, is none other than our own individual will — however, working here from a zone far outside the range of the perceiving dream consciousness and hence experienced by the latter as pitiless, inexorable Fate.

May it not be, now, that the Fate that appears in the world of reality, the design that probably everyone has had occasion to observe in the development of his own life, may have something about it analogous to the relationship here observed in the dream?

Sometimes it happens that we draw up a plan and set our hearts upon its accomplishment, until later it becomes apparent that the plan was not for our true good at all. And in the meantime, trying our best to carry it out, we have found that Fate had somehow cursed it, setting all its machinery into motion against it; so that ultimately, entirely against our will, we find ourselves pressed back into what for us is the better path. In the face of such apparently intentional opposition, people are accustomed to saying: “It wasn’t meant to be!” Some call it ominous, others a sign from God; but all share the opinion that when Fate with obvious determination thus sets itself against a project, we had better give it up. The project being one that does not befit our unconscious destiny, it will never be brought to fulfillment, and in sticking to it stubbornly with stiff-necked persistence, we are only inviting Fate to deal us stiffer and stiffer pokes in the ribs, until finally we are got back into our proper channel. Or if, on the other hand, we at last succeed in forcing the project through, it will only redound to our injury and distress. In this, the above quoted ducunt volentem fata, nolentem trahunt finds its adequate justification.

Often it becomes apparent, after the struggle is over, that the defeat was for our good. But is it not possible that the defeat may have been for our good even when its benefits never become apparent — particularly when we consider our true good from the metaphysical-moral point of view?

And if we look back now to the main conclusion of my entire philosophy; namely, that what the phenomenon of the world embodies and represents is the Will, the very same Will that lives and struggles in each separate individual; and if we consider the generally recognized similarity of life and dream; then, summarizing our entire discussion, we may permit ourselves to imagine that, just as each of us is the hidden director of his own dreams, so, in analogous fashion, may the fate that governs each of our lives proceed ultimately from that Will, which, though it is our own, yet works its influence from a region far beyond the horizon of our individual perceiving consciousness. Still, it is this limited perceiving consciousness that furnishes the motives to our empirically knowable, individual will. Naturally, then, this latter must frequently come into violent conflict with that other will of ours which appears to us as our Fate, as our guiding genius, as our “Spirit, dwelling outside of us, his throne the highest stars,” whose vision, far outdistancing that of the individual consciousness, reveals itself as an inexorable outer coercion, preparing and controlling what, though it cannot be revealed to the individual, he must never get wrong.

To lessen the strangeness, yea, the exorbitance, of this bold proposition, let me quote a passage from Scotus Erigena. His “God,” it must be kept in mind, is without knowledge. Neither time and space nor the ten Aristotelean categories can be predicated to him. He has, in fact, only one predicate, and that is — Will. Clearly then, he is nothing other than what I have been terming the Will to Life. In Erigena’s words: “There is yet another kind of ignorance in God, inasmuch as he may be said not to know what things he foreknows and predestines until they have appeared experientially in the course of created events.” And directly thereafter: “There is a third kind of divine ignorance, in that God may be said to be ignorant of things not yet made manifest in their effects through experience of their action and operation; of which, nevertheless, he holds the invisible causes in himself, by himself created, and to himself known.”^{Note 49}

But now, if, in order to make our point a bit more comprehensible, we have called upon the well-known similarity of the individual life to dream, let it not be forgotten, on the other hand, that in dreams the relationship is one-sided; that is to say, that only one ego actually wills and experiences while the others are nothing but phantoms, whereas in the great dream of life there exists a reciprocal relationship: each not only appears in the other’s dream precisely as there required, but also experiences the other in a similar way in his own dream; so that, by virtue of an actual harmonia praestabilita, each dreams only what is appropriate to his own metaphysical guidance, and yet all the life dreams are interwoven so artfully that, while each experiences only what redounds to his own increase, he performs what the others require. Hence, a vast world event conforms to the destiny-requirements of many thousands, befitting each in his own way.

Every event in every individual life must then be implicated in two fundamentally different orders of relationship: first, in the objective, causal order of the course of nature, and second, in a subjective order relevant only to the experiencing individual himself and as subjective, consequently, as his dreams — where the sequence and content of the occurrences are as predetermined as the scenes of a drama, and, indeed, in the same way, namely, by plan of the author. However, that these two sorts of relationship should exist together, and in such a way that every event must be a link simultaneously in two completely different chains with the two conjoining perfectly, the fate of each thus harmonizing with the fate of every other, each the hero of his own drama and yet an actor in all the rest: this is certainly something that surpasses our comprehension, and can be imagined as possible only in terms of the most miraculous harmonia praestabilita.

But, on the other hand, would it not be an act of narrow-minded cowardice to maintain that it would be impossible for the life paths of all mankind in their complex interrelationships to exhibit as much concert and harmony as a composer can bring into the many apparently disconnected and haphazardly turbulent voices of his symphony? Our timidity before this colossal prospect may be allayed if we remind ourselves that the Subject of this great dream of life is, in a certain sense, only one, namely the Will to Life itself; and furthermore, that all this multiplicity of the phenomena is conditioned by time and space. It is a vast dream, dreamed by a single being; but in such a way that all the dream characters dream too. Hence, everything interlocks and harmonizes with everything else.^{Note 50}

It would be difficult to find a more exact statement than this of the sense and plane of experience of Finnegans Wake, where the plunge, so to say, has actually been taken into those waters of the sea that Stephen, in Ulysses, was considering from the point of view only of the shore: the shore of waking consciousness, where the knower and the known, the slayer and the slain, begetter and begotten, subject and object, are set apart and distinguished from each other. In sleep, the dreamer and the dream are one, though seeming to be two, and a clue to the mystery has thus here been found of that “consubstantiality of the Father and Son” upon which Stephen, throughout his day, was brooding. However, with this image of the dreamer and analogy of sleep, a portentous step has been taken away from the position assumed by Kant toward all definitions of the metaphysical sphere.

Let us pause on this problem for a moment.

In the Kantian vein, it would not be suggested that God either is or could be the sleeper — nor has Schopenhauer, indeed, said so much, either. It is only “as if” (als ob) God were the sleeper: as a dream (a) is to its dreamer (b), so is the manifold of this universe (c) to that unknown (x), which is called in our tradition “God.” One might also say, however, without preference or prejudice for any one metaphor over another: as children (a¹) from parents (b¹), or as the work of art (a²) from the artist (b²), as sparks (a³) from a fire (b³), or as an idea (a⁴) from the mind (b⁴), so is the manifold of this universe (c) derived from that unknown (x) which is called in Buddhist texts “the Void.” The term x, it is to be insisted, remains, through all this, absolutely unknown and unknowable; and this being so, oneness can no more be a quality of x than can love or reason, wrath, personality, goodness, justice, mercy, being, or non-being. Atheism, as well as theism, is but an optional way of thinking beyond thought. As Kant has shown, it is only by analogy that we speak of love or reason as of God: x remaining unknown, the nature of its relationship to c must likewise remain unknown. In fact — and here, now, we come to our splitting of the ways — to speak in terms of a relationship is itself entirely optional, since in the idea of a relationship a duality is implied — a c and an x; whereas it is also possible, as in Oriental thought, in Neoplatonic thought, and as in this metaphor of dream, to speak of identity — and to mean it. Let us use the simple sign R to signify relationship, a relationship of any kind whatsoever; then let c, as above, stand for the manifold of the universe or any part of it, and x, as above, for the unknown that is called “God” in our part of the world both by those who think they know, and by those who know that they do not know, what they are talking about when they use that suggestive term. The popular, ecclesiastically authorized Occidental manner of thinking about c and x will then be represented by the formula:

cRx

which means: this manifold of the universe and everything in it (c) stands in some sort of relationship (R) to the unknown (x); whereas, according to the basic Oriental formula (first pronounced, as far as we know, by the Indian sage Aruni, while instructing his son Shvetaketu, some six or eight centuries b.c.):^{Note 51}

tat tvam asi, “thou art that,” c = x.

It is made clear in the Oriental texts, however, that the term “thou” (c) here intended is not to be understood flat-footedly in the way “common to all men” of experiencing the universe and themselves. As we read in the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, there are four planes, or modes, or “quarters” of being:

1. The first is that “common to all men.” Its field is the waking state. Its consciousness is outward-turned. Here subject and object are separate from each other, A is not B (A ≠ B), and the laws of Aristotelean logic prevail.
2. The second field or portion of being, called “the shining one,” is of the dream state. Its consciousness is inward-turned. Here subject and object are one yet seem to be two: the laws of Aristotelean logic do not apply. This is the field of Finnegans Wake, into which that of Ulysses dissolved when Stephen disappeared into the night, Bloom fell asleep in Molly’s bed, and Molly herself went off to sleep, musing “I said yes I will Yes.”^{Note 52} In Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, it is the field called Apollonian. In Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Idea, it is the field of Platonic ideas, and the visual arts (See Experience and Authority and The World Transformed.). It is the field of all mythic forms, the gods, the demons, heavens and hells, and since the seer and seen are here one and the same, all the gods, demons, heavens and hells, whether of the Orient or of Dante, are to be recognized here as within us.
3. he third field and portion of being is of deep dreamless sleep, where the sleeper neither desires anything desirable nor is in fear of anything terrible. It is called the field of “the knower” (prājn̄ā), who is here undivided, as an “undifferentiated continuum” (This is Professor F.S.C. Northrup’s term for this field, translating the Sanskrit, ghana, “homogeneous lump.”) of unconscious consciousness, consisting of bliss and feeding on bliss, “its only mouth being spirit.” “This,” declares the text, “is the Generative Womb of All, the Beginning and End of Beings.” It is, in Gottfried’s Tristan, the state symbolized in the love grotto, where the two, conjoined, lived on love and fed on bliss; in alchemy, that symbolized in Figure 58 and by the dragon in the vas, Figure 55: Ovid’s Chaos.
4. What is known as “the Fourth,” the fourth portion of the self, is silence unqualified: neither of any thing nor of no thing; neither inward- nor outward-turned, nor the two together; neither knowing nor unknowing — because invisible, ineffable, intangible, devoid of characteristics, inconceivable, undefinable, the coming to peaceful rest of all differentiated, relative existence: utterly quiet, peaceful-blissful, without a second. “This,” we read, “is the Self to be realized.”^{Note 53} A ground that is no ground: this, then, is the ultimate ground of being.

The totality of being, however, is all four of these states, not merely any one. Hence, while it is true that “thou art that” (c = x), nevertheless, if by “thou” you understand only the person and world of stage 1, then “thou art not that” (c ≠ x). This point is made in meditation disciplines through an exercise of the realization neti neti, “not this, not this”: thou art not thy body, but the witness, the consciousness, of the body; not any of thy thoughts or feelings, but the witness, the consciousness of thy thoughts,” and so forth; after which comes the realization iti iti, “it is this, it is this”: śivo-’ham, “I am myself the Blissful One.” All of which yields the ultimate oxymoron:

c ≠ = x

In Schopenhauer’s philosophy, as suggested by the title of his major work, The World as Will and Idea, both ways of conceiving of the inconceivable mystery are represented: the way of the oxymoron c ≠ = x being that of “the world as will,” and the way of relationship, cRx, that of “the world as idea” — which two, in Nietzsche’s vocabulary, became respectively the Dionysian and Apollonian modes — with these, in turn, corresponding to the contrasting Indian types of religion associated respectively with Śiva and with Viṣṇu.

Glancing back, furthermore, to what we have learned of the archaic beginnings of these mythic forms, we recall the early Osirian cult of the first four dynasties of Egypt: an awesome, terribly dark affair of massive suttee burials, which, with the coming of the Fifth Dynasty (c. 2480–2350 b.c.), was supplanted by the religion of light, of the god Re. The antecedents of the Osirian cycle were developed, as we have seen in Oriental Mythology,^{Note 54} in the nuclear Near East, possibly as early as the eighth millennium b.c., during the critical epoch of the dawn of the arts and cults of agriculture, and the reference of its mysteries was not originally, as in later times, to the death and life immortal of individuals, but to the death and rebirth of that Being of beings, that Lord of life and death, who puts on individuals and puts them off as a man puts on and puts off clothes. The moon, ever waxing and waning, is the celestial sign of this power, and on earth its chief animal symbols are the serpent, the boar, and the bull (Figures 18 to 27), whereas the cult of Re was of the sun, the falcon, the lion, and, in later times, the horse (Figures 37 and 38). Moreover, as the blithe little legend of the birth of the first three Fifth Dynasty Pharaohs shows,^{Note 55} the solar, in contrast to the somber lunar cult, brought with it a spirit of just such delight and joyous grace as Nietzsche assigns to the Apollonian sphere.

And so we are dealing here, actually, with two mythological archetypes of immemorial age, going back, respectively (if my surmise holds), to the primitive plant-environment of the tropics, where from the death and rot of vegetation, life is seen to spring ever anew and the individual counts for no more than a fallen leaf; and, on the other hand, the primitive animal environment of the Great Hunt of the paleolithic animal plains, where the individual and his hunting skill counted for a great deal indeed. — But all this I have discussed already, at length.^{Note 56}

V. Beauty Way

In Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which is generally taken to be pessimistic, the path followed is neti neti, “not this, not this,” the first stage of its passage to wisdom being marked by a radical turn of interest from the crude struggle for existence to those arts that Nietzsche terms Apollonian. Here empirical objects are beheld not as things desirable or to be feared (i.e. in any biological, economic, political, or moral relationship [R] to the subject), but as objectifications of their own informing ideas (See Experience and Authority and The World Transformed.), objects in and for themselves. And the sentiment characteristic of this stage is that “enchantment of the heart” of which Joyce speaks in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where his hero, Stephen Dedalus, quotes Aquinas: Ad pulcritudinem tria requiruntur integritas, consonantia, claritas: “Three things are needed for beauty, wholeness, harmony and radiance”; and proceeds, then, to an exposition of the basic aesthetic theory of his author, James Joyce.

Stephen was walking with his coarser-grained college companion Lynch along a Dublin street, pointing to a basket that a passing butcher’s boy had slung inverted on his head. The clipped style of his discourse carries a mixture of dead seriousness and banter, while Lynch cooperatively clowns the role of straight man:

—Look at that basket, Stephen said.

—I see it, said Lynch.

—In order to see that basket, said Stephen, your mind first of all separates the basket from the rest of the visible universe which is not the basket. The first phase of apprehension is a bounding line drawn about the object to be apprehended. An esthetic image is presented to us either in space or in time. What is audible is presented in time, what is visible is presented in space. But, temporal or spatial, the esthetic image is first luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space or time which is not it. You apprehend it as one thing. You see it as one whole. You apprehend its wholeness. That is integritas.

—Bull’s eye! said Lynch, laughing. Go on.

—Then, said Stephen, you pass from point to point, led by its formal lines; you apprehend it as balanced part against part within its limits; you feel the rhythm of its structure. In other words, the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension. Having first felt that it is one thing you feel now that it is a thing. You apprehend it as complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts, the result of its parts and their sum, harmonious. That is consonantia.

—Bull’s eye again! siad Lynch wittily. Tell me now what is claritas and you win the cigar.

—The connotation of the word, Stephen said, is rather vague. Aquinas uses a term which seems to be inexact. It baffled me for a long time. It would lead you to believe that he had in mind symbolism or idealism, the supreme quality of beauty being a light from some other world, the idea of which the matter is but a shadow, the reality of which it is but a symbol. I thought he might mean that claritas is the artistic discovery and representation of the divine purpose in anything or a force of generalisation which would make the esthetic image a universal one, make it outshine its proper conditions. But that is literary talk. I understand it so. When you have apprehended that basket as one thing and have then analysed it according to its form and apprehended it as a thing you make the only synthesis which is logically and esthetically permissible. You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing. The radiance of which he speaks is the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing. This supreme quality is felt by the artist when the esthetic image is first conceived in his imagination. The mind in that mysterious instant Shelley likened beautifully to a fading coal. The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the clear radiance of the esthetic image, is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony is the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure, a spiritual state very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani, using a phrase almost as beautiful as Shelley’s, called the enchantment of the heart.^{Note 57}

Now the term “stasis,” of which Stephen has here made use, is of the very essence of Joyce’s thesis; for, as made clear at the opening of his argument: “proper” as opposed to “improper” art (art serving ends, that is to say, that are proper to art itself) is static — not kinetic.

“The feelings excited by improper art,” Stephen said, “are kinetic, desire or loathing. Desire urges us to possess, to go to something; loathing urges us to abandon, to go from something. The arts which excite them, pornographical or didactic, are therefore improper arts. The esthetic emotion … is therefore static. The mind is arrested and raised above desire and loathing.”^{Note 58}

Compare the state of the Buddha at the time of his awakening on the “Immovable (i.e. Static) Spot,” moved neither by desire nor by fear.^{Note 59}

I call this parallel important.

Compare, also, the words of Schopenhauer on the mode of vision proper to art, where the “Platonic Idea” (his equivalent of Joyce’s quidditas) or “Thing-in-Itselfness” of an object is perceived by an unselfconscious subject:

The shift from the usual way of perceiving individual objects to their perception as Idea occurs abruptly [Schopenhauer declares], when the act of perception has become dissociated from the service of the will, because the seeing subject has ceased to be merely ego-oriented and is now a pure, will-less subject of knowledge, no longer attentive to relationships in a causal context, but resting and fulfilling itself in fixed contemplation of the presented object, out of all connection with any other.… When one is no longer concerned with the Where, the When, the Why and the What-for of things, but only and alone with the What, and lets go even of all abstract thoughts about them, intellectual concepts and consciousness, but instead of all that, gives over the whole force of one’s spirit to the act of perceiving, becomes absorbed in it and lets every bit of one’s consciousness be filled in the quiet contemplation of the natural object immediately present — be it a landscape, a tree, a rock, a building, or anything else at all; actually and fully, in the sense of a highly meaningful manner of speech, losing oneself in the object: forgetting one’s own individuality, one’s will, and remaining there only as a pure subject, a clear mirror to the object — so that it is as though the object alone were there, without anyone regarding it, and to such a degree that one might no longer distinguish the beholder from the act of beholding, the two having become one, with the entire field of consciousness filled and taken in by that single perceptible form; in sum: when the object has been to that extent removed from all relationship to anything but itself, and the subject out of all relation to the will, then what is beheld and recognized is no longer that thing as commonly known, but the Idea, the timeless Form, an immediate, self-standing objectification of the will at this grade of being. And by the same token, the person absorbed in this mode of seeing is no longer an individual — the individual has lost himself in the perception — but is a pure, will-less, painless, timeless, Subject of Apprehension.… And it was just this that was running in Spinoza’s mind when he wrote: mens aeterna est, quatenus res sub aeternitatis specie concipit (“Mind is eternal, in so far as it apprehends an object under the species of eternity”).^{Note 60}

And there is, too, the poem “Natural Music” of our own Californian poet Robinson Jeffers:

The old voice of the ocean, the bird chatter of little rivers,

(Winter has given them gold for silver

To stain their water and bladed green for brown to line their banks)

From different throats intone one language.

So I believe if we were strong enough to listen without

Divisions of desire and terror

To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger-smitten cities,

Those voices also would be found

Clean as a child’s; or like some girl’s breathing who dances alone

By the ocean-shore, dreaming of lovers.^{Note 61}

The next stage or level in Schopenhauer’s understanding of the order of depth experiences furnished by life itself is that of the awe, mystic dread, or terror described in his passage cited by Nietzsche: where the individual, feeling himself to be safe on the raging sea in his little floatable craft, “suddenly finds himself in error with respect to his interpretation of the forms of appearance.” The transition then is from an aesthetic (Apollonian) to a properly religious dimension of experience (or, in Nietzsche’s terminology, toward Dionysian rapture); and the sense of awe, dread, or terror that is then experienced is something different altogether from any “kinetic,” natural loathing or terror before an odious or dangerous object. For the precipitating cause here is not an object. It is the sense, rather, of a break in the tissue of temporal-spatialcausal relationships by which objects are supported, by which the subject too is supported: a chilling, stilling, indubitable sense of the immediacy of something — there? here? where? — that is inconceivable : a void perhaps, a god perhaps, or a ghost.

Professor Rudolf Otto, in his work on The Idea of the Holy, cited to this point in Oriental Mythology,^{Note 62} has identified this experience of awe, of dread, as reciprocal to the Kantian x (See Kant’s formula, a:b::c:x.), the source and prime ingredient of religion — all religion: an experience sui generis, which is lost, however, when identified with the Good, the True, Love, Mercy, the Law, this conceptualized deity or that. No one can be taught it; nor can it be explained to anyone who has not known it. Yet all religions, mythologies, and “proper” works of art both derive from and refer to it, and so must remain, for all those inaccessible to the experience, mere shells to be applied to other use: as, for instance, to magic, to pageantry, and to the maintenance of fools in the seats of the wise, to consolation (like the psalms), to the flattering of a race (like the Old Testament) or of an ecclesiastical social mission (like the New), to the disciplining of youth, decorating of blank walls, or blank hours, or to the preparation of old folk for approaching death.

The feeling of it [Professor Otto writes] may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide, pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its “profane,” non-religious mood of everyday experience. It may burst in sudden eruption up from the depths of the soul with spasms and convulsions, or lead to the strangest excitements, to intoxicated frenzy, to transport, and to ecstasy. It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to ah almost grisly horror and shuddering. It has its crude, barbaric antecedents and early manifestations, and again it may be developed into something beautiful and pure and glorious. It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of — whom or what? In the presence of that which is a Mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.^{Note 63}

Joyce, in his discussion of aesthetics, writes of the same as the “secret cause” of the arresting (static) tragic emotion of terror, the other face of which is tragic pity: so that here again, as in Nietzsche’s view, the birth of tragedy as an art of the depth and species of a religion is interpreted in terms of a simultaneous revelation of the powers of the two gods, respectively, of the abyss and of individuation.

“Pity,” Stephen said, “is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the human sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.”^{Note 64}

A properly tragic art, that is to say, points to what is grave and constant in the lot of man: what cannot be done away by any alteration of social, political, or economic conditions, but, if life is to be affirmed, must be included in the affirmation. What is secondary and contingent, and so can perhaps be altered, is for the social critics and their kinetic — didactic — art. However, they mislead and poison to the root the very lives and life they conceive themselves to be improving if, in a zeal for social-political change, they attribute to the mere conditions of the century those pains and impulses that are actually of life itself and which, if life is to be affirmed, must also be affirmed. For when these are impugned, life is impugned and emptied — without, however, being honestly denied, nor yet existentially affirmed; and as Schopenhauer already saw, this internally blind, externally deluded way of work is one of the most dangerous, psychologically destructive forces of our time.

Everywhere and in all ages [he wrote in the middle of the nineteenth century], there has been great dissatisfaction with governments, laws, and public institutions; mainly, however, because people are always ready to blame these for the misery that inheres in human existence and is the curse, so to say, that descended on Adam and his whole race. Never has there been a more lying and impudent exploitation of this false projection, however, than that of the demagogues of this “modern” day. These enemies of Christianity are optimists: the world, for them, is an end in itself and in terms of its own crude conditions available for conversion into a dwelling of perfect bliss. The howling, colossal evils of our century they ascribe entirely to the regimes, blame altogether and only on these; and without these, there would be heaven on earth, i.e. all of us, set free of toil and pain, would be able, to our hearts’ content, to feed and swill, propagate and burst: for that is the paraphrase of this “end in itself” and the goal of the “endless progress of mankind,” that they tirelessly preach with their overblown clichés.^{Note 65}

That is perhaps a bit strong. However, it makes the difficult point: that if the truth of life is not recognized and faced where it is and as it is, either to be denied as saints deny it, or else to be affirmed without shame in oneself, as in all, if life is to be affirmed, then the fruit of the tree of this world can be only a brain-maddening poison, causing each to ascribe to someone else — and to curse there and to battle there — the source of all pain, which is the monstrous thing that, in himself, is the very living of his life.

It is the function, the power and fascination of the tragic art, as indeed of all art when turned to art’s proper task — which is namely “de faire ressortir les grandes lignes de la nature” (to quote again the words of the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle) — to render an experience in affirmation of life as it is, in form and in depth, in this vale of tears: over and above the terror, the pity, and the pain, communicating an exhilaration of the will’s affirmation of life in its being and becoming, here and now.

In order for art to exist, or indeed for any aesthetic doing or seeing whatsoever to exist [Nietzsche wrote in one of his last works, The Twilight of the Idols (1888)], “there is a physiological prerequisite that is not to be avoided: intoxication. Intoxication must first have heightened the sensibility of the whole machine, before it can come to any art. And all kinds of special varieties of intoxication have the power to work in this way: above all, that of sexual excitement, which is the first and oldest form of intoxication. And then, too, the intoxication that comes with any great desire, any great emotion: the intoxication of the festival, of a combat, bravado, victory, or of any extreme movement; the intoxication of ferocity; the intoxication of destruction; intoxication under various sorts of meteorological influence, that of spring for example; or under the influence of narcotics; or finally the intoxication sheerly of the will, of an overcharged, inflated will. — The essential thing in all intoxication is the feeling of heightened power and a fullness. With this feeling one addresses oneself to things, compels them to receive what one has to give, one overpowers them: and this procedure is called idealization. But let us, right here, get rid of a prepossession: idealization does not, as is generally thought, consist in a leaving out, a subtraction of the insignificant, the incidental. What is decisive, rather, is a tremendous exaggeration of the main features, before which those others disappear.

In this condition, one enriches everything out of one’s own abundance: whatever one sees or desires, one sees swelling, bursting, mighty, overladen with power. The individual in this condition changes things until they are mirrors of his own energy — reflections of his own perfection. And this compulsion to change things to perfection — is art. Everything, even what he is not, becomes for such a one a delighting in himself: in art man takes delight in himself as perfection.

The psychology of the orgiastic as of an overflowing feeling of life and power in which even pain has the effect of a stimulant, provided me with the key to the concept of the tragic feeling, which has been misunderstood as well by Aristotle as, particularly, by our modern pessimists. Tragedy is so far from proving anything about the pessimism of the Hellenes that it may, on the contrary, be taken as its definitive rejection and antithesis. Saying yes to life, even in its most inimical, hardest problems, the will to life delighting even in the offering up of its highest types to its own inexhaustibility — that is what I have called Dionysian, that is what I have divined to be the bridge to the psychology of the tragic poet. Not to be unladen through pity and terror, not to be purged by this vehement discharge of a dangerous emotion (as in Aristotle’s view), but beyond terror and pity, to be oneself identified with the everlasting joy of becoming — that joy which includes in itself the. joy in destruction as well.…^{Note 66}

For Schopenhauer, on the other hand, all those were the faults, not the virtues, of art.

The enjoyment of the beautiful, the consolation that art affords [he declared from his own, more somber, tender, and more solemn point of view], the enthusiasm of the artist, which allows him to forget the pains of existence (such a faculty for enthusiasm being the only advantage of the genius over other men, by which he is compensated for the intensified sorrow that he will experience in proportion to the clarity of his consciousness, as well as for the desert loneliness he experiences among people of a different order of being), all this rests upon the fact that while the very being of life, the will, our sheer existence, is an unremitting agony, part pitiful, part terrible, nevertheless, when viewed purely as Idea (as Image), and when reproduced thus in art, free of its inherent torture, it affords a drama full of significance. This purely knowable side of the world and its reproduction in art, one art or another, is the artist’s element. He is locked to the contemplation of the drama of the objectification of the will: with that he rests, and he never tires of regarding and reproducing it in pictures; and meanwhile, he himself bears the costs of the production of that play, for he is himself the will that is objectified that way, and so remains in constant pain. That pure, true, and deep knowledge of the inward nature of the world becomes for him an end in itself: he does not go past it. Hence, it does not become for him, as for the saint who attains to resignation, a quieter of the will; it does not release him from life permanently, but only momentarily, and so is not for him the way out of it but only an occasional consolation within it: until his powers, increased by this contemplation, finally, becoming tired of the play, grasp the seriousness of it all — for which transition we may take the painting of St. Cecilia* by Raphael as our type.^{Note 67}

^*St. Cecilia, patroness of music, is there shown at the organ, gazing upward to a light descending from aloft.

For in Schopenhauer’s view, the will, the will to life, which is the very Being of beings, is a blind, insatiable drive, motivating all and eventuating mainly in the sorrows and deaths of all — as anyone can see — yet willfully continued. The more strongly the will to life is affirmed, the more painful are its effects, not only in the willing subject, whose will for more is only enhanced by success, never quelled; but also, and even more hurtfully, in those round about him, whose equivalent wills he frustrates. For each of us in his own way, as Schopenhauer tells, is metaphysically and essentially the entire world as will, and consequently can be satisfied with nothing less than possession of the entire world as object, which, since everyone would have it so, is not possible to any. Recognizing this, and filled, like the Buddha, with compassion by the spectacle of universal pain (the First Noble Truth: “All life is sorrowful” ), the undeluded, really honest individual — in Schopenhauer’s view — can only conclude that life is the will’s (or God’s) mistake, something that never should have been, and, renouncing its dynamism in himself, achieve within — ironically — that absolute peace sought by all: assisting others then, through example and through teaching, to the same end — the only end possible (except the aggravation of pain) this side of death.

And as the philosopher tells in the last sentence of his major work, The World as Will and Idea: “What then remains, after the will has been extinguished utterly, is, in the view of all those still full of the will, nothing, to be sure. However, conversely, for those in whom the will, turning, has denied itself, this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and Milky Ways is — nothing.” And to this he adds in his last footnote: “This precisely is the Prajnaparamita, the ‘Yonderside of All Knowledge’ of the Buddhists, where subject and object are no more.”

VI. The Altar and the Pulpit

In The Magic Mountain the musical device of the Leitmotiv carries a Dionysian, oceanic sense of recurrences, ever returning like waves, the same again, yet not the same: expanding, breaking, throwing spray in all directions, interpenetrating in the way of the forms of life — which likewise arise, take shape, and, interpenetrating, dissolve into the substance of all. Schopenhauer had written of music as an art corresponding in principle to the world experienced as will, and this idea had excited Wagner.* The young Nietzsche, then, taking Wagner’s music drama — and specifically his Tristan — as example, wrote in The Birth of Tragedy of music, on one hand, and stage characters, on the other, as representing respectively the spheres of the universal and particular, the universalia ante rem (the will) and the principium individuationis (the individual), with the myth, the Dionysian legend, joining the two: functioning in such a way that the music should not ravish us altogether from this world of separate lives, nor, on the other hand, our concern for the two individuals lead us to forget their immortal ground. The myth, Nietzsche thus saw, is the Apollonian display of what Joyce was to call the grave and constant in human sufferings: a vision of enduring forms midway between the passing figures of day and the night of dreamless sleep. And, as the world has ever known, it is exactly here, in this sphere of vision, that the individual nightly meets the gods, those personifications of the functioning of will by which his own destiny is controlled.

Thus mythology and the psychology of dream are recognized as related, even identical. And as Thomas Mann has pointed out in his anniversary essay on “The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner” (February 10, 1933: fiftieth anniversary of Wagner’s death), not only did that great master release opera from its merely historical-anecdotal limitations by expanding it to myth (and to such a degree that “as one listens to him,” writes Mann, “one can almost believe that music was created for nothing else, and could never again submit to anything else, but to serve the myth”); but he also joined, to this synthesis of music and mythology, psychology.

A book could be written [wrote Mann] on Wagner’s psychology, and it would deal with the psychological art of the musician as well as of the poet, in so far as these two powers in him can be separated. The technical device of the “recognition theme” (Erinnerungsmotiv), already suggested in earlier operas, became gradually developed in his work to a profoundly meaningful virtuosic system that converts music into an instrument of psychological associations, deepenings, and references, to a degree never known before. The transformation, for example, of the naïve, epic, magic theme of the “Love Potion” into a mere device for releasing a passion already present (actually, it could have been pure water the lovers drank, and believing they had drunk death, they would have been released psychologically from the moral laws of their day) is the poetic inspiration of a great psychologist. And consider how, even from the beginning, the poetic powers of Wagner transcended the scope of mere libretto.…

Mann points to the words of the Flying Dutchman, sung to Senta in their duet of Act II, where he asks whether love be really the name for the glow that he feels burning in his breast, and replies to himself, “Ah no! it is the yearning for release!” Release through her from the curse that binds him to the world. “May it — through such an angel as this — be mine!”

Die düstre Glut, die hier ich fühle brennen,

Soll ich Unseliger sie Liebe nennen?

Ach nein, die Sehnsucht ist es nach dem Heil.

Würd’ es durch solchen Engel mir zuteil!

“Simple, singable lines,” comments Mann, “but never before had any such complicated, psychologically intricate thought been sung, or even programmed to be sung.” Pointing next to the case of the dawning love-yearning of the boy Siegfried, as rendered by Wagner in both words and music, as a complex of presentiments welling from the unconscious, glowing with mother-associations, sexual desire, and anxiety; and then again to the scene where the dwarf Mime is striving to teach fear to his young pupil, while in the orchestra the motive sounds, in a darkly distorted way, of Brünnhilde asleep in her ring of flame: “—that is Freud,” states Mann, “that is Analysis, nothing else. And we also recall,” he adds, “that in Freud too (whose psychological root-research and depth-science were anticipated in grand style by Nietzsche), the interest in mythology, in the primitive and pre-cultural aspects of humanity, was in the closest manner bound to his psychological interest.”^{Note 68}

Figure 60. Monogram of Thomas Mann

The figure of the lyre in Mann’s own monogram (Figure 60) is the sign of his identification of himself with this tradition, wherein music, myth, and depth psychology are one and carried in the Leitmotiv — which is a device that Mann even compares at one point to a monstrance: the radiant golden receptacle in which, in the Roman Catholic benediction service, the consecrated Host is exposed to view and elevated by the priest for admiration, contemplation, and worship.^{Note 69} Wagner’s music, as he points out, is no longer properly music, but literature.

It is psychology, symbol, mythology, accent — everything; but not music in the pure and full sense.… Nor are the texts around which it burgeons, fulfilling them as drama, properly literature — but music. Furthermore, even while gushing like a geyser from prehistoric depths of myth (and not only seemingly, but actually), this music is nevertheless thought up, calculated, highly intelligent, pointedly clever, and no less literary in conception than the texts are musical. Broken down to its prime components, music is turned to the service of mythic ideas of philosophical purport, forcing them into high relief. The disquiet chromatic scale of the “Liebestod” is a literary idea. The elemental flow of the Rhine; the seven primal blocks of accord that build Valhalla: these too are literature.… These sequences of symbolic motive-quotations, strewn about like fragments of rock in the streambed of an elementary musical torrent: to ask that these should be experienced as music in the sense of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, were to ask too much.^{Note 70}

As in Ulysses, then, so here: the Leitmotiv serves both in Wagner and in Mann to release in us recognitions Qf connection between moments, events, characters, and objects that are apparently separate from each other, yet in depth of a single form — in the manner, as we have already said, of the coming together of the scattered parts of an anamorphosis. And the memories recalled, furthermore, will meanwhile have become associated in our minds with related matters of our own unconscious. “Music,” states Thomas Mann, “is the language of ‘Once upon a time’ in its double sense of ‘As all once was’ and ‘As all is to be.’”^{Note 71} And so too, we know, is myth. So too is dream: so romance; so love: and so too is night. Alpha and Omega: Beginning and End.

“With yearning,” Wagner wrote from Paris to Mathilde Wesendonck, March 3, 1860, “I frequently gaze toward the land Nirvana. But then, very soon, Nirvana becomes for me Tristan: you know the Buddhist theory of the beginning of the world. A breath disturbs heaven’s clarity…” and here in his letter Wagner set down the four notes, chromatically ascending, that open his metaphysical score and bring it to its close (G sharp, A, A sharp, B); after which his sentence continues, but referring now simultaneously to the turbulence of the world’s beginning, his score, and his own spirit: “this swells, condenses, and finally in impenetrable massiveness, the world again stands before me.”^{Note 72}

“To link art and religion this way,” comments Mann, “through a bold operatic treatment of sex, and to offer such a holy piece of unholy artistry as a Lourdes-theater and miracle-grotto, catering to the hankering for belief of a jaded fin de siècle public: that is sheer romanticism; something absolutely unthinkable in the classically humanistic, properly respectable sphere of art.”^{Note 73} “Romanticism,” he states (and here I want to place an accent), “is linked to all those mythic mother and lunar cults that have flourished since the earlier periods of the human race in opposition to solar worship, the religion of fatherly, masculine light: and it is under the spell of this general lunar world-view that Wagner’s Tristan stands.”^{Note 74}

But Mann’s own work, for the most part, is under this spell as well; and he points this out himself, both repeatedly and clearly, throughout his mythological tetralogy of Joseph and His Brothers — I. The Tales of Jacob (1933), II. Young Joseph (1934), III. Joseph in Egypt (1936), and IV. Joseph the Provider (1943) — where Jacob and Joseph, his heroes, are explicitly associated with the ambiguous, neither-nor, both-and logic of what he calls, “lunar syntax,”^{Note 75} in contrast to the uncomplicated, black-is-not-white and white-is-not-black, sunny-side-up mode of flatland thought of both Esau, the ruddy, hairy man, and the band of Joseph’s warrior brothers. Moreover, the principle of erotic irony, defined in “Tonio Kröger” as balanced between the two worlds of light and of night, is itself already of the lunar, Aphroditic-Hermetic, musical mode of being, and nowhere is this balance of life, and of the whole created world, between the two opposed simplicities more amply and richly made manifest, in a veritable symphony of echoing associations, than in the great work of this author’s apogee in mid-career, The Magic Mountain.

The main lines of this novel, as already remarked, are simple enough; namely, of a young man who fares to an Alpine sanatorium for a visit of three weeks, develops there a fever, and, instead of three weeks, spends an aeon of seven years, returning to his homeland only when the First World War breaks out, to serve voluntarily his country’s flag. The adventure conforms, that is to say, in both structure and sense, to a traditional rite de passage, or mythological hero adventure, the archetypal course of which — as I have shown in my earlier work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces^{Note 76} — universally follows a pattern of three stages: separation, initiation, return, which I have called (using a term from Finnegans Wake), the nuclear unit of The Monomyth.^{Note 77} (Compare, for example, the cycle of the mystery-cult initiation illustrated in the bowl of Figure 5.)

In The Magic Mountain the absolutely indispensable break from the world of common day — from those duties, thoughts, feelings, and highest concerns “common to all men” which are dictated not by one’s own experiences and discoveries but by others — is represented directly at the opening, in the steep climb of the narrow-gauge Alpine train to its almost inaccessible destination aloft. Mann compares the clear sky, the sight of timeless snow-capped peaks, and the heart-accelerating thin air up there to a potion, a magic drink, as of the river Lethe; and the mountaintop itself he compares to the summit of the Brocken, where the gods of pre-Christian Europe annually celebrate Walpurgisnacht — to which saturnalia of devils, witches, and the dead, Mephistopheles guided Faust. An equivalent association (already evident in the title) is with the legendary Venus Mountain, where the Minnesinger Tannhäuser, as celebrated by Wagner, was supposed to have dwelt in love with the Lady Venus. And still another is with the night-sea voyage of Odysseus to Circe’s isle and to the underworld (to which she introduced him) of Persephone, Queen of the Dead. Mann compares the sealed-off situation of his hero in the sanatorium with that of the primal matter in the alchemist’s vas Hermeticum, undergoing fermentation for sublimation into philosophical gold.

Thus in Mann’s ostensibly naturalistic novel, as in Joyce’s of approximately the same date (Ulysses, 1922; The Magic Mountain, 1924), there is an intended, scrupulously controlled opening downward of associations — largely through a skillful use of the Leitmotiv — to the timeless, “grave and constant” archetypes of myth; and in each instance, furthermore, the author’s subsequent work (Finnegans Wake, 1939; Joseph and His Brothers, 1933–1943) dropped into the sphere of myth altogether. Essentially, the problem that both faced and resolved was the same on at least three levels: first, on the personal level of the artist dwelling in a world of people (as Schopenhauer phrased it) of another race, another order of experience and expression; next on the aesthetic level of twentieth-century novelists, who had inherited from their forebears an essentially rationalistic, naturalistic, anecdotal-historical narrative art, inadequate to their understanding of psychology in its universal, mythological, as well as individual, biographically conditioned aspects; and then, thirdly, on the religious level, the related problem of an inherited ecclesiastical tradition of publicly professed beliefs, altogether incongruent not only to the sciences but also to the actual moral order and humanistic conscience of the secularized “Christian” nations of this modem world.

James Joyce had been born a Catholic; Thomas Mann, a Protestant. Both had broken from their family spheres of belief in the ways Actionized in their first novels and short stories (“Stephen Hero," 1903, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916; Buddenbrooks, 1902 and “Tonio Kröger," 1903); and each then cleared the way for himself — along parallel courses, at about the same pace, date for date — to an art of the most sophisticated psychologico-mythological ambiguities. Mann developed his position toward myth from Luther and Goethe, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche; Joyce, on the other hand, from the Middle Ages, Dante and Aquinas, Shakespeare, Blake, and then Ibsen. Consequently, although they were indeed on parallel courses, there were great differences between them in approach and aim as well as background, and with significant contrasts in result.

Joyce, for instance, as a Catholic, had been at home in the sphere of religious myth from infancy and, as he shows in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, was already at a very tender age interpreting his experiences in mythological terms and his mythology in terms of what he saw, felt, and was able to think. As we read of the little schoolboy sitting brooding at his classroom desk:

He turned to the flyleaf of the geography and read what he had written: himself, his name and where he was.

Stephen Dedalus

Class of Elements

Clongowes Wood College

Sallins

County Kildare

Ireland

Europe

The World

The Universe

That was in his writing: and Fleming one night for a cod had written on the opposite page:

Stephen Dedalus is my name,

Ireland is my nation.

Clongowes is my dwellingplace

And heaven my expectation.

He read the verses backwards but then they were not poetry. Then he read the flyleaf from the bottom to the top till he came to his own name. That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the universe? Nothing. But was there anything round the universe to show where it stopped before the nothing place began? It could not be a wall*;* Here is the source of the “wall” theme in Finnegans Wake. but there could be a thin thin line there all round everything and everywhere. Only God could do that. He tried to think what a big thought that must be; but he could only think of God. God was God’s name just as his name was Stephen. Dieu was the French for God and that was God’s name too; and when any one prayed to God and said Dieu then God knew at once that it was a French person that was praying. But, though there were different names for God in all the different languages in the world and God understood what all the people who prayed said in their different languages, still God remained always the same God and God’s real name was God.

It made him very tired to think that way.

A little later, another set of religious problems arose to occupy his thought:

The protestants used to make fun of the litany of the Blessed Virgin. Tower of Ivory, they used to say, House of Gold! How could a woman be a tower of ivory or a house of gold? Who was right then?…

Eileen had long white hands. One evening when playing tig she had put her hands over her eyes: long and white and thin and cold and soft. That was ivory: a cold white thing. That was the meaning of Tower of Ivory.…

One day he had stood beside her looking into the hotel grounds. A waiter was running up a trail of bunting on the flagstaff and a fox terrier was scampering to and fro on the sunny lawn. She had put her hand into his pocket where his hand was and he had felt how cool and thin and soft her hand was. She had said that pockets were funny things to have: and then all of a sudden she had broken away and had run laughing down the sloping curve of the path. Her fair hair had streamed out behind her like gold in the sun. Tower of Ivory. House of Gold. By thinking of things you could understand them.^{Note 78}

There is an echo of this little moment too in Finnegans Wake: “playing house of ivary dower of gould.…”

Moreover, Joyce to the end retained an essentially priestly attitude toward the practice and function of his art; whereas Mann, the German Protestant, had the attitude, rather, of the preaching parson. The priest, saying Mass with his back to the congregation, is performing a miracle at his altar, much like that of the alchemist, bringing God himself into presence in the bread and wine, out of the nowhere into the here: and it matters not, to either God, the priest, the bread, or the wine, whether any congregation is present or not. The miracle takes place, and that is what the Mass, the opus, the act, is all about. Its effect is the salvation of the world. Whereas the preacher in his pulpit is addressing himself to people, to persuade them to some sort of life way, and if no one is present there is no event. Mann, accordingly, is writing to persuade. He explains, interprets, and evaluates discursively the symbols of his art, whereas Joyce simply presents, without author’s comment. Furthermore, in his approach to symbols Mann comes to them from the secular world, through literature and art, not by way of the ingraining from childhood of the iconography of a seriously accepted, ritually ordered religion. Not the altar but the pulpit is the center of his mysterium, and where symbols are involved, they are associated in his mind rather with a family cult of household events and ancestral personages, leading back through time, than with timeless visionary personifications of cosmological, metaphysical import: which, by the way, is perhaps one of the great reasons why Protestant versions of the Christian faith tend to lean more heavily than the Catholic on the family-cult theology of the Old Testament, which when seriously considered as an appropriate base for a proper world religion is constitutionally ineligible, since it is finally but the overinterpreted parochial history and manufactured genealogy of a single sub-race of a southwest Asian Semitic strain, late to appear and, though of great and noble influence, by no means what its own version of the history of the human race sets it up to be. Nor was the ancestral line of the Buddenbrooks, the Krögers, or the Castorps quite comparable in import or in force to the metaphysical mysteries symbolized in the Trinity, the Word Made Flesh, and the sacrament of the Mass.

Carl Jung has well described the contrast of the Catholic and Protestant psychological states in relation to their understanding of symbols:

The history of Protestantism [he writes] has been one of chronic iconoclasm. One wall after another fell. And the work of destruction was not too difficult once the authority of the Church had been shattered. We all know how, in large things as in small, in general as well as in particular, piece after piece collapsed, and how the alarming poverty of symbols that is now the condition of our life came about. With that the power of the Church has vanished too — a fortress robbed of its bastions and casemates, a house whose walls have been plucked away, exposed to all the winds of the world and to all dangers.

Although this is, properly speaking, a lamentable collapse that offends our sense of history, the disintegration of Protestantism into nearly four hundred denominations is yet a sure sign that the restlessness continues. The Protestant is cast out into a state of defenselessness that might well make the natural man shudder. His enlightened consciousness, of course, refuses to take cognizance of this fact, and is quietly looking elsewhere for what has been lost to Europe. We seek the effective images, the thought-forms that satisfy the restlessness of heart and mind, and we find the treasures of the East.…

Shall we be able to put on, like a new suit of clothes, ready-made symbols grown on foreign soil, saturated with foreign blood, spoken in a foreign tongue, nourished by a foreign culture, interwoven with foreign history, and so resemble a beggar who wraps himself in kingly raiment, a king who disguises himself as a beggar? No doubt this is possible. Or is there something in ourselves that commands us to go in for no mummeries, but perhaps even to sew our garment ourselves?

I am convinced [Jung continues] that the growing impoverishment of symbols has a meaning. It is a development that has an inner consistency. Everything that we have not thought about, and that has therefore been deprived of a meaningful connection with our developing consciousness, has got lost. If we now try to cover our nakedness with the gorgeous trappings of the East, as the theosophists do, we would be playing our own history false. A man does not sink down to beggary only to pose afterwards as an Indian potentate. It seems to me that it would be far better stoutly to avow our spiritual poverty, our symbol-lessness, instead of feigning a legacy to which we are not the legitimate heirs at all. We are, surely, the rightful heirs of Christian symbolism, but somehow we have squandered this heritage. We have let the house our fathers built fall into decay, and now we try to break into Oriental palaces that our fathers never knew. Anyone who has lost the historical symbols and cannot be satisfied with substitutes is certainly in a very difficult position today: before him there yawns the void, and he turns away from it in horror. What is worse, the vacuum gets filled with absurd political and social ideas, which one and all are distinguished by their spiritual bleakness. But if he cannot get along with those pedantic dogmatisms, he sees himself forced to be serious for once with his alleged trust in God, though it usually turns out that his fear of things going wrong if he did so is even more persuasive. This fear is far from unjustified, for where God is closest the danger seems greatest. It is dangerous to avow spiritual poverty, for the poor man has desires, and whoever has desires calls down some fatality on himself. A Swiss proverb puts it drastically: “Behind every rich man stands a devil, and behind every poor man two.”

Just as in Christianity the vow of worldly poverty turned the mind away from the riches of this earth, so spiritual poverty seeks to renounce the false riches of the spirit in order to withdraw not only from the sorry remnants — which today call themselves the Protestant church — of a great past, but also from all the allurements of the odorous East; in order, finally, to dwell with itself alone, where, in the cold light of consciousness, the blank barrenness of the world reaches to the very stars.

We have inherited this poverty from our fathers.…^{Note 79}

The plight of the Catholic, on the other hand, is today precisely the opposite. For he is not deprived; he is overladen with symbols which have been built into his very nerves but have no relevance to modern life; and his dangerous exposure, therefore, is not to a void within, but, as a kind of Rip van Winkle or perennial Don Quixote, to an alien world without, which in his heart is dogmatically denied and is yet, to his eyes, visibly before him. If he has luck (shall we call it luck?), he may live to the end encapsulated in his Nicene Creed (of the date 325 a.d.) and die, so to say, as yet unborn from the womb of Holy Mother Church. But if the walls of his Church break apart — as they had for many already in the middle of the Middle Ages — he has literally Hell to pay. His problem then is either to liquidate in himself the structuring mythology of his mythologically structured life, or else somehow to unbind its archetypal symbols from their provincial Christian, pseudo-historic references and restore to them their primary force and value as mythological-psychological universals — which in fact has been the typical effort of unorthodox Catholic thinkers in the West ever since the military victory of Constantine and the enforcement, then, by Theodosius the Great (r. 379–395 a.d.) of one incredible credo for the Western world.

Dogma [states Jung], takes the place of the collective unconscious by formulating its contents on a grand scale. The Catholic way of life is completely unaware of psychological problems in the Protestant sense. Almost the entire life of the collective unconscious has been channeled into the dogmatic archetypal ideas and flows along like a well-controlled stream in the symbolism of creed and ritual. It manifests itself in the inwardness of the Catholic psyche. The collective unconscious as we understand it today was never before a matter of “psychology”; for before the Christian Church existed there were the antique mysteries, and these reach back into the gray mists of neolithic prehistory. Mankind has never lacked powerful images to lend magical aid against all the uncanny things that live in the depths of the psyche. Always the figures of the unconscious were expressed in protecting and healing images and in this way were expelled from the psyche into cosmic space.

The iconoclasm of the Reformation, however, quite literally made a breach in the protective wall of sacred images, and since then one image after another has crumbled away. They became dubious, for they conflicted with awakening reason. Besides, people had long since forgotten what they meant. Or had they really forgotten? Could it be that men had never really known what they meant, and that only in recent times did it occur to the Protestant part of mankind that actually we haven’t the remotest conception of what is meant by the Virgin Birth, the divinity of Christ, and the complexities of the Trinity? It almost seems as if these images had just lived, and as if their living existence had simply been accepted without question and without reflection, much as everyone decorates Christmas trees or hides Easter eggs without ever knowing what these customs mean. The fact is that archetypal images are so packed with meaning in themselves that people never think of asking what they really do mean. That the gods die from time to time is due to man’s sudden discovery that they do not mean anything, that they are made by human hands, useless idols of wood and stone. In reality, however, he has merely discovered that up till then he has never thought about his images at all. And when he starts thinking about them, he does so with the help of what he calls “reason” — which in point of fact is nothing more than the sum-total of all his prejudices and myopic views.^{Note 80}

James Joyce opened his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with a motto taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book VIII, line 188), “Et ignotas animum dimittit in artes: And his mind he addresses to unknown arts.” The verse refers to the artist-craftsman Daedalus in Crete, at the moment when he determined to escape and turned his mind to the task of inventing wings, wings of art, by which to fly to the mainland. In Joyce’s mind the immediate reference of this image, allegorically, was to his own (his hero Stephen Dedalus’s) decision to fly from the little world of Ireland to the larger of the European mainland. But there was also in his mind the idea of flying from the lesser horizon, the mythological province so to say, of the Roman Catholic version of Christianity, and even the Christian version of the mythological archetypes, to the larger — if possible, largest — human view: not by way of a conversion of any kind to some other communal order of so-called belief, but by way of art.

When his friend Cranly asked Stephen Dedalus whether he was thinking now of becoming a Protestant: “I said that I had lost the faith,” Stephen answered, “but not that I had lost selfrespect. What kind of liberation would that be to forsake an absurdity which is logical and coherent and to embrace one which is illogical and incoherent?”^{Note 81}

The structure of any completely unfolded, well-considered mythological system — be it Byzantine or Gothic, Hindu, Buddhist, Polynesian, or Navaho — is harmoniously beautiful and of Apollonian clarity, and at the same time fully electrified with experienced (though not necessarily rationalized) life significance and radiance. The Roman Catholic linkage to myth, therefore, is not “romantic” in the yearning Protestant sense, as to a void of unknown purport, but is firm and solid and clear. For the Catholic it is rather the outside, non-Catholic, non-mythological world that has been handed over to the Devil and is chaotic, daemonic, and void. “History,” states Stephen, in the course of his long helljoumey of Ulysses in a world of living man, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”^{Note 82} And in the late afternoon of that same day the great thunderclap resounds, announcing rain — the break in the sterile Waste Land spell of dissociation between the inward, sense-giving structure and the outward context of his life; after which, in the Walpurgisnacht of the brothels chapter, there follows the regenerating interplay between the two undeniable worlds of inward symbolic imagery and outward literal fact, which is to lead directly to the purgatorial dream of Finnegans Wake. There the optically present but spiritually uninterpreted, unassimilated, hence alien, deracinated Waste Land of a world of merely waking consciousness, separately self-defensive personalities, separated religions, separate national histories, even separate scholarspecialists, gives way to the principle of the “consubstantiality” of myth in dream. The meaningless nightmare of history is disintegrated and significantly recomposed in the mythological image of the ever-revolving cycle of four world ages. All becomes radiant with the omnipresent, all-suffusing, polarized image of that “onesame power of nature or of spirit” that is simultaneously and everywhere at serious war and humorous peace with itself, “as the sole condition and means of its himundher manifestation.” And there resounds through all the outside world, thereby, the echo of that yea which is the undismayed, inward, world-asserting and-maintaining creative principle in all: as the Hindus say, “from the Being of beings to the blade of grass.”

But in The Magic Mountain, also, something similar occurs. It is amazing, in fact, how many themes and symbols these two independently working contemporary novelists shared; in Ulysses and The Magic Mountain, for instance: the symbolism of a land of the dead, with a brooding, questing youth searching for an attitude to life; a naturalistic setting, structured in such a way as to include significantly, on one hand, a hospital and medical environment and, on the other, a library and atmosphere of study, affording pedagogical influences from the spheres both of literature and of science, all with bearing on the grave and constant themes of death and love; an emergent mythological underpainting, which assimilates the fields of modern life-experience to those of traditional humanity and is musically suggested through an echoing Leitmotiv technique; a sexual strain, culminating in a chapter conceived as a Walpurgisnacht adventure; and even, indeed, a thunderclap to mark the moment of transformation, when the hero’s life in the land of the dead turns to life, and he is seriously confronted with the task of integrating substantially his two worlds. However, and here is the contrast, whereas in Ulysses the voice of thunder is heard before the Walpurgisnacht of hallucinatory inward-outward interplays, in The Magic Mountain the chapter entitled “The Thunderbolt” is the last of the novel and follows all the great revelatory scenes. Moreover, it leads the young hero not further into sleep, but back to the field of history. It is the news of the start of the First World War which bursts “like a thunderpeal” and brings Hans Castorp, “the Seven Sleeper,” voluntarily, and even gratefully for his awakening to life, into the nightmare of the trenches — and not on the side of the political dream of his Mediterranean, Francophile, literary friend and mentor, Settembrini, but on the home side, “there where blood called,” of his kindred.

Thus on the Irish-Catholic side the call of thunder had come from within, from the ingrained mythic world of timeless universal to which the particulars of the world without were now to be integrated, while on the German-Protestant side the call came, on the contrary, from without, from the field of specifically European history — homeland, parochial family history, and partisan commitment — which in fact, however, had been made interior to the soul of this particular German youth by the family-oriented Christianity of his reverent paternal home. Yet the two adventures, though historically opposite, were in depth equivalent, having to do alike with the one task of integrating the temporal and timeless aspects of existence.

A practical relationship to the temporal-historical order of his century had been well established in childhood in Hans Castorp, whereas with the timeless world of universals he became familiar only during those seven years of meditation (ages twenty-three to thirty) on the summit of the Magic Mountain. Stephen Dedalus, on the other hand, had been brought up not on family Bibles and heirlooms, but on the mystery of transubstantiation, and when the call of the temporal world came to him in the lovely form of that girl who stood before him in midstream, “like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird,” what he encountered when he went forth, in answer to her call, “to live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life,” was a nightmare vision of Hell, which it required the whole mighty work of Finnegans Wake to sublimate into philosophical gold.

The same mythological themes, the same depths, are thus sounded in these two contrasting works by two very different artists: men, however, of equivalent profundity of experience, breadth of learning, and skill in communication. And they will serve, therefore, to make my point — or rather, Nietzsche’s point — of the myth as the revelatory factor by which the incidents of the daylight world are discovered linked to that ground which is the ground of all and gives to everything its life. However, to be known as such, the myth cannot be thought of as fixed, once and for all, dogmatically defined. Rather it is to be rediscovered by the artist eye, fresh and alive, as the form of this event and that: as a pattern that is no pattern, but in each thing uniquely present as never before.

VII. Democracy and the Terror

What, then, is the Waste Land?

It is the land where the myth is patterned by authority, not emergent from life; where there is no poet’s eye to see, no adventure to be lived, where all is set for all and forever: Utopia! Again, it is the land where poets languish and priestly spirits thrive, whose task it is only to repeat, enforce, and elucidate cliches. And this blight of the soul extends today from the cathedral close to the university campus. Nietzsche made the point almost a century ago.

Here and there I come in touch with German universities [he wrote in his Twilight of the Idols, 1888]: what an atmosphere prevails among the scholars, what a spiritual desert, how lukewarm and complacent! It would be a profound misunderstanding to bring up German science against me on this point — and a proof, besides, that not a single word I have written had been read. For I have been calling attention for the past seventeen years, untiringly, to the despiritualizing influence of our present-day science industry. The hard helotism to which the prodigious range of the contemporary sciences condemns every individual scholar is the main reason why the fuller, richer, more profoundly endowed of our students can no longer find appropriate education or educators. There is nothing from which this culture suffers more than from superabundance of pretentious corner-watchers and fragments of humanity; and the universities, against their will, are the real hothouses of this kind of stunting of the spiritual instincts. All of Europe has already a realization of this: no one is fooled by our high politics.… Germany is regarded, more and more, as Europe’s Flatland.^{Note 83}

The only correction I can find needed for a translation of this murderous criticism to our own mid-twentieth century would be a change of the word “against” to “with all.” First, a religious training in coined platitudes from a world as far from the modern as any could possibly be; next, a so-called liberal-arts education, by way of lecture courses, seminars and quizzes, week by week: “great books” summarized and evaluated, stuffed into emptied heads as authorized information, to be signaled back, for grades; and then the sciences — at the outer reaches of thought! — all taught by sterilized authorities who, in those unrecapturable years of their own youth, when the ears, eyes, and heart of the spirit open to the marvel of oneself and the universe, were condemned to that same hard helotism of which Nietzsche writes. There is no time, no place, no permission — let alone encouragement — for experience. And to make things even worse, along now come those possessed socio-political maniacs with their campus rallies, picket-line slogans, journalistic ballyhoo, and summonses to action in the name of causes of which their callow flocks had scarcely heard six months before — and even those marginal hours that might have been left from study for inward growth are invaded, wrecked, and strewn with daily rubbish. It is hardly to be wondered if the young people of the world today look a bit like rubbish-strewn rooms themselves and in their Dionysiac “trips” and “happenings” promise to match the agapēs of the early Christian Church.

Thomas Mann in The Magic Mountain makes a good deal of the term “hermetic pedagogy.” The idea suggested is of a sealingoff from historical time and an inward-turning to inward time: activation of the mind through appropriate influences from without, but then a response in terms of one’s own readiness and pace of growth, not the needs, ideals, and expectations of anyone else, any group, or any so-called world. On the flatland life is reaction, whereas on the timeless mountaintop — as in the alchemist’s vas Hermeticum — there can be fermentation, spontaneity, action as opposed to reaction: truly what is meant by the term “education” (e-ducere, “to lead or draw forth”) as opposed to “inculcation” (inculcare, “to stamp in with the heel”). And absolutely indispensable for any such development is that separation from the demands of the day which all educators — until recently — understood to be the first requirement for anything approaching a spiritual life.

In The Magic Mountain the figure most strongly opposed to Hans Castorp’s separation from history and surrender to the luxury of selfand world-discovery is the first of those two ludicrous pedagogues between whom the author placed his hero: the delicate, graceful, black-mustached Italian humanist and journalist, Settembrini, who reminds Hans not a little of an organ-grinder. Mann introduces him as Satana, Mephistopheles, a personification of the intellect striving to gain control over life: the pied piper of rhetorical progressivism, Mediterranean clarity, reason, and grace of form, whose name, however, suggests the ominous verb septembriser, “to massacre in cold blood” (from the noun septembrisades, referring to the massacre in Paris prisons of the royalists, September 2–6, 1792). Seedy yet elegant in his frayed jacket and black-and-white-checked trousers, which, though threadbare (like his ideas), were always neatly pressed, this mellifluous encyclopedist of the political school of Mazzini plays the role in relation to Hans of Mephistopheles to Faust: able to furnish advice and aid, with an aim to winning his charge’s soul, but unable either to understand or to gain control over his will.

“When I want to read something to turn my insides upside down,” wrote Mann in his volume of unpolitical reflections,

something at which every bit of me roils in opposition (and such reading can at times be useful), I open the volume of Mazzini that one day, without any merit or effort of my own, came, as though sent from heaven, into my hands, and to which I owe not only the beginnings of my bit of insight into the nature of political virtue, but also my understanding of the background from which the German civilisation-littérateur has derived the style, posture, intonation, and passion of his political manifesto. Here I have in hand the Latin Freemason, Democrat, literary revolutionary, and progressive rhetorician in pure culture and full bloom. Here I learn to think of the spirit as something between the spirit of the deep Orient and the spirit of the Jacobin Club, which indeed is how it has to be understood today, now that “virtue” [in the sense of Marat and Robespierre] has been rehabilitated. Here I can admire a spectacle of activism stopping at nothing, untouched by any blemish of doubt, one moment standing before its people, eyes lifted to heaven, declaiming with broadest gesture, and the next, fists clenched and with hissing breath, leaping about, inciting, agitating, goading to rebellion. Here the barricades are called “the people’s throne.” Here I hear a man who can say: “morality and technology!” “Christ and the Press!”^{Note 84}

This type of champion of the light of reason, in the sense of liberté, egalité, fraternité — or death, is a late stereotyped and vulgarized, so to say priestly, reduction of the great Renaissance type of the free spirit; and Mann has succeeded marvelously in communicating to his trite pedagogue an afterglow of the nobility of those great humanists in whose light he abides: Virgil himself, as well as Petrarch, Lorenzo and Politian, Machiavelli, and Castiglione, on to the French Enlightenment in Diderot and Voltaire. The purifying, consecrating influence of literature, the destruction of the passions through knowledge and the word; the idea of literature as the highway to understanding, to forgiveness, and to love; the saving power of speech; the literary spirit as the noblest manifestation of the human spirit altogether; the literary man as man fulfilled, as saint: it was to this luminous tune that Settembrini’s apologia was ever sung.

But in Nietzsche’s terminology, as announced in The Birth of Tragedy, this precisely was the character of Socrates, Socratic man, as prototype and protagonist of “the Decadence,” in the sense of the intellect subduing, disorienting, and dissolving life, unloving of its imperfection, sterilized to its mystery; the type, in other words, that Schopenhauer had denounced in his paragraph, above cited, on those who attribute to local, temporal conditions the ills inherent in life itself, and, in their zeal to correct, discompose the life they would save.

A key is offered to the character of Socrates [wrote Nietzsche] in that remarkable phenomenon known as “the daemon of Socrates.” When in certain situations his prodigious intellect began to vacillate, he would recover assurance from a divine voice that addressed him only at such times. And whenever this voice was heard, it warned against. That is to say, in the case of this altogether abnormal character, instinctive wisdom asserted itself only occasionally, and then, in restraint of his conscious judgment. Whereas in all productive people it is precisely instinct that is the creative, urging force and the conscious mind that plays the critical, warning role, in the case of Socrates, instinct is the critic and consciousness the creator — which is truly a monstrosity per defectum! Moreover, what his case in fact represents is a monstrous occultation of the mystical faculty; so that Socrates must be viewed as the specific pattern of the non-mystic, in whom the logical faculty has become as exorbitantly developed by superfetation as instinctive wisdom in the mystic. Furthermore, for the logical talent of Socrates to turn against itself was altogether impossible. In that unbridled verbal torrent of his there is manifest such a power of nature as we otherwise encounter with awestruck amazement only in the most grandiose manifestations of instinct. Whoever, while reading the Platonic dialogues, has received any impression at all of the divine simplicity and assurance of Socrates’ way of life, must also have gotten a sense of the way the prodigious driving wheel of logical Socratism is revolving, as it were, behind Socrates and is to be seen through Socrates as through a shadow. And that he himself had some suspicion of this is evident in the noble earnestness with which he everywhere avouched his divine calling, even before his final judges. To confute him in this was ultimately as impossible as to call his disintegrating influence on the instincts good.^{Note 85}

As the proclaimed antagonist of instinct and the self-appointed corrector of those unconsidered modes of life that are inspired not by intellect but by impulse (in Tonio Kröger’s terms, not by “spirit” but by “nature”) Socratic man appears and becomes dominant at the end, not the beginning, of a culture. Oswald Spengler, in The Decline of the West (1923), following Nietzsche in this observation, compared the courses of eight high culture histories (Egyptian, Sumero-Babylonian, Greco-Roman, Indian, Chinese, Maya-Aztec, Levantine, and West European; with the Russian, in his view, at about the stage today of the West European in the period of Charlemagne), and demonstrated, with supporting evidence enough to persuade anyone who would take pains to check fully and carefully on his data, that in each of these great superindividual life courses a moment did indeed inevitably arise when the critical-intellectual faculties gained ascendancy over the lyric-instinctual, at which point a brief period of enlightened creativity unfolded that always ended, however, in exhaustion, sterility, and mechanical repetition. Goethe (who, with Nietzsche, was Spengler’s leading inspiration, as he was also Thomas Mann’s) in a brief study called “Epochs of the Spirit” had outlined, already at the opening of the nineteenth century (1817), a sequence of four stages normal to all culture cycles, whether of mankind in general, a civilization, or a nation, which he then summarized in the following diagram:

Beginnings
deeply experienced perceptions: aptly named

I	Poetry	Folk Belief	Hearty	Imagination
II	Theology	Idealizing Exaltation	Holy	Reason (Vernuft)
III	Philosophy	Clarifying Devaluation	Wise	Understanding (Verstand)
IV	Prose	Dissolution in Banality	Vulgar	Sensuality

Confusion, Resistance, Dissolution

It is in the passage from Stage II to Stage III that mentality gains the upper hand and reductive criticism begins to devaluate and, where possible, even eradicate the instinctual impulses to life. As Goethe states the problem:

The man of understanding tries to appropriate everything imaginable to his own sphere of clarity and even to interpret reasonably the most mysterious phenomena. Popular and ecclesiastical beliefs, consequently, are not rejected, but behind them a comprehensible, worthy, useful component is assumed, its meaning is sought, the particular is transformed into the general, and from everything national, regional, and even individual, something valid for mankind as a whole is extracted. We cannot deny to this epoch the credit of a noble, pure, and wise endeavor; however, its appeal is rather to the unique, highly talented individual than to an entire folk.

For, no sooner does this type of thought become general than the final epoch immediately follows, which we may term the prosaic, since it has no interest in humanizing the heritage from earlier periods, adapting it to a clarified human understanding and to general domestic usage, but drags even the most venerable out into the light of common day and in this way destroys completely all solemn feelings, popular and ecclesiastical beliefs, and even the beliefs of the enlightened understanding itself — which might yet suspect behind what is exceptional some respectable context of associations.

This epoch cannot last long. Human need, aggravated by the course of history, leaps backward over intelligent leadership, confuses priestly, folk, and primitive beliefs, grabs now here, now there, at traditions, submerges itself in mysteries, sets fairy-tales in the place of poetry, and elevates these to articles of belief. Instead of intelligently instructing and quietly influencing, people now strew seeds and weeds together indiscriminately on all sides; no central point is offered any more on which to concentrate, but every-odd individual steps forward as leader and teacher, and gives forth his perfect folly as a perfected whole. And so, the force of every mystery is undone, the people’s religion itself profaned; distinctions that formerly grew from each other in natural development now work against each other as contradictory elements, and thus we have the Tohu-wa-Bohu chaos again: but not the first, gravid, fruitful one; rather, a dying one running to decay, from which not even the spirit of God could create for itself a worthy world.^{Note 86}

Thomas Mann presents Settembrini as the paradigmatic master of Stage III, surviving, however, only as an invalid in a world that is at the opening of Stage IV, where an apparently new, but actually harshly medieval, reactionary type of self-appointed pedagogue is emerging as both teacher of youth and adviser to the leaders of state. In The Magic Mountain this second, altogether ambiguous type of spiritual mentor is represented by the small, haggard, clean-shaven, expensively tailored little figure of a man named Naphta, who comes into the novel just halfway through: an aggressive, well-rehearsed debater of almost corrosive ugliness, whose thin, pursed, disdainful lips are surmounted by a vast hooked nose, and this, in turn, by thick glasses framing a pair of pale gray eyes. Settembrini teasingly refers to him as princeps scholasticorum; he to Settembrini, in turn, as the Master Mason, “Master of the Lodge”; and with every phrase, every word, on every conceivable subject, the two clash blades in endless verbal combat, flashing and splitting definitions. One is defending the glory of man and the spirit as revealed in the faculty of reason; the other, God and the spirit transcendent, absolutely apart from and against fallen, natural man, his instincts, reason, pretensions to freedom, progress, science, rights, and all the rest. Naphta charges Settembrini with the heresy of monism; Settembrini, Naphta with dualism and world-splitting. Both pretend to stand for the individual; Naphta, however, for his eternal soul, not his rights or powers here on earth. Both stand for man’s zeal for truth; however, truth, according to Naphta, is inaccessible to reason, its sole authority being revelation; nor is the formulation of laws and customs properly a function of human councils, since there is but one law eternal, that of God, the ius divinum, which is to be enforced — enforced — by those anointed in authority:

“That the Renaissance brought all those things into the world that are called liberalism, individualism, humanistic citizenship, I am well aware,” said the acrid Naphta to his humanist antagonist; “but the striving, heroic age of your ideals already is long past. Those ideals are dead; or, at least, they lie today gasping their last, and the feet of those who will deal the finishing kicks are already at the door. If I am not mistaken, you call yourself a revolutionary. But if you think freedom is to be the issue of future revolutions, you are wrong. The principle of freedom has, in the past five hundred years, fulfilled its course and outlived itself. Any method of pedagogy that still considers itself to be a child of the Enlightenment and regards as proper aims for itself a development of the critical faculties, liberation and cultivation of the individual, and thereby the dissolution of modes of life eternally fixed — may still enjoy for a while an apparent rhetorical success: but to those who know, the reactionary character of such teaching is beyond question. All truly serious educational orders have known forever what the one and only possible principle of all pedagogy must be: namely the absolute command, the iron bond, in the name of discipline, sacrifice, denial of ego, subjugation of the personality. And finally, it is an unloving misunderstanding of youth to suppose that it finds its pleasure in freedom. Its deepest pleasure is obedience.…

“No!” he continued. “Not liberation and development of the individual are the secret and requirement of this age. What it needs, what it yearns for, and what it will create for itself is — the Terror.”

The expensively tailored little talker had, for that final word, lowered his voice; he uttered it without move or gesture. Only his glasses briefly flashed. And the auditors, Hans and his military cousin, as well as Settembrini, were appalled. The eloquent humanist, recovering however, asked with assumed levity whence the Terror, then, was to arrive.

“Is your English economic liberalism unaware of the existence of a school of social thought,” the other disdainfully replied, “which represents the human victory over economic thinking, and of which both the fundamentals and the aims correspond precisely to those of the Christian City of God? The Church Fathers called ‘mine’ and ‘thine’ pernicious words, and private property, theft and usurpation. They repudiated personal possessions because, according to the God-given Law of Nature, this earth is common to all men and brings forth its fruits for the general use. They taught that it is only avarice, a consequence of the Fall, which has put forward the rights of property and created private ownership. They were humane enough, anti-commercial enough, to call economic activity of any sort whatsoever a danger to the soul’s salvation — which is to say: a danger to humanity. They hated money and finance, and called capitalistic wealth the burning point of the fire of Hell … And now: after centuries of disregard, all these economic principles and criterions are being resurrected in the modern movement of Communism. The agreement is complete, even to the point of the claim to world dominion made by International Labor against international business and finance; the world proletariat is today opposing to the capitalistic corruption of the bourgeoisie the ideal of humanity and criterion of the City of God. The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, this politico-economic means to salvation proper to our age, does not intend to dominate for its own sake and for all time, but only in the way of a temporary annulment of the opposition of Spirit and Force in the Sign of the Cross: in the sense of overcoming the World by the means of World Mastery, in the sense of transition, transcendence, the Kingdom. The Proletariat has taken up again the work of Gregory the Great, his zeal for God dwells in it, and no less than he will it withhold its hand from blood. Its task is to strike fear into hearts for the redemption of the world and the gaining, at last, of the Redeemer’s goal, the stateless, classless condition of man as the child of God.”^{Note 87}

The little vehicle of cynical hate giving utterance to this apocalyptic vision of the Day of God was an ordained Jesuit, born a Jew: a full Judeo-Christian! but developing ideas just a bit ahead of those conventional to either of his successive Testaments, and so, running a temperature, residing on the Magic Mountain with a touch of death in his lung. “Ein joli jésuite,” thought Hans, “mit einer petite tache humide.” “All his thoughts,” said Settembrini, “are lascivious: they are under the sign of Death.”^{Note 88} And indeed, in his luxurious, silk-upholstered apartment, a fourteenth-century pieta proposed an ideal of ugly beauty that was altogether in contrast to that of Settembrini’s Renaissance bellezza. It was a work (as he explained to Hans) conceived in the ascetic spirit of a witty piece of writing by Innocent III, bearing the title De miseria humanae conditionis: not the prettified production of any Monsieur This or Monsieur That, but anonymous, impersonal, a radical revelation, sub signo mortificationis, of the knowledge of sorrow and frailty of the flesh.^{Note 89}

The young engineer was able to recognize in this impressive work, and in the arguments of Naphta, a depth of insight into the woes of the world that went beyond that of his other mentor, Settembrini. However, the separation by Naphta of the values of the spirit from those of living in this world with love for it as it is, left him unconvinced. Pain, sickness, death and corruption, indeed: but were these a refutation of life? Mann has managed to bring to focus in Naphta, this little monster, the whole historic sweep of Levantine spirituality, in irreconcilable opposition to the native humanistic individualism of Europe.

Behold, the Lord will lay waste the earth and make it desolate, and he will twist its surface and scatter its inhabitants. And it shall be, as with the people, so with the priest; as with the slave, so with his master; as with the maid, so with her mistress; as with the buyer, so with the seller; as with the lender, so with the borrower; as with the creditor, so with the debtor. The earth shall be utterly laid waste and utterly despoiled; for the Lord has spoken this word.

The earth mourns and withers, the world languishes and withers; the heavens languish together with the earth. The earth lies polluted under its inhabitants; for they have transgressed the laws, violated the statutes, broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore a curse devours the earth, and its inhabitants suffer for their guilt; therefore the inhabitants of the earth are scorched, and few men are left.^{Note 90}

There is no need to ask or to wonder what the new world is to be like; for we have read of it in the annals of the past and see its latter form before us, even now, in the People’s Paradise of the U.S.S.R., China, Eastern Europe, and Tibet, leaking refugees at every unwalled, unwired, unmachine-gunned rathole.^{Note 91}

They found a man gathering sticks on the sabbath day. And those who found him gathering sticks brought him to Moses and Aaron, and to all the congregation. They put him in custody, because it had not been made plain what should be done to him. And the Lord said to Moses, “The man shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him with stones outside the camp.” And all the congregation brought him outside the camp, and stoned him to death with stones, as the Lord commanded Moses.^{Note 92}

Society everywhere [states Emerson] is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members.… It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.… Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind.^{Note 93}

And Goethe:

The Godhead is effective in the living and not in the dead, in the becoming and the changing, not in the become and the set-fast; and therefore, accordingly, reason (Vernunft) is concerned only to strive toward the divine through the becoming and the living, and the understanding (Verstand) only to make use of the become and set-fast.^{Note 94}

VIII. The Amfortas Wound

In
Figure 61. Amfortas: the crippled kingPrimitive Mythology it has been pointed out that there is no such thing as man qua man. The young of the species Homo sapiens are born too soon, absolutely helpless, and acquire their specifically human faculties of speech, thought, and a symbolizing imagination, as well as erect posture and ability to use tools, under the tutelage of the particular social body into which they are adopted. They grow up to its style and world, imprinted with its signature, molded to its limitations; and the first function of the myths and rites of each group is simply to bring this specialized development to pass. The earliest social units, furthermore, were hardly greater than large families, of which every adult member was in possession of the entire cultural heritage. The myths embodied the substance of this heritage and the rites were the means by which it was both communicated to the young and maintained in force among the old. The myths and rites, that is to say, served a fostering, educative function, bearing the unfinished nature product to full, harmonious unfoldment as an adult specifically adapted for survival in a certain specific environment, as a fully participating member of a specific social group; and apart from that group he would neither have come to maturity nor have been able to survive.

In our present world we have such family rites as well, and as long as it is this psychological, educative function that they serve, as rites of passage, fostering the young to a maturity fit for this day and age, there can be little quarrel either with them or with those by whom they are administered. However, the world today is not as it was in the paleolithic ages, when the roving family hordes of mankind were rare and scattered companies on this earth, foraging as newcomers in a perilous environment of beasts. Nature was then very hard; society, therefore, too. Youngsters found to be intractable were simply wiped away. Conformity in the narrowest sense was an absolute necessity. And yet even then there was an allowance made for a certain type of deviant, the visionary, the shaman: the one who had died and come back to life, the one who had met and talked with spirit powers, the one whose great dreams and vivid hallucinations told effectively of forces deeper and more essential than the normally visible surface of things. And it was, in fact, from the insights of just these strangely gifted ones that the myths and rites of the primitive communities were in largest part derived.^{Note 95} They were the first finders and exposers of those inner realities that are recognized today as of the psyche. Hence the myths and rites, of which they were the masters, served not only the outward (supposed) function of influencing nature, causing game to appear, illness to abate, foes to fall, and friends to flourish, but also the inward (actual) work of touching and awakening the deep strata and springs of the human imagination; so that the practical needs of living in a certain specific geographical environment — in the arctic, tropics, desert, grassy plains, on a mountain peak or on a coral isle — should be fulfilled, as it were, in play: all the world and its features, and the deeds of man within it, being rendered luminous by participation in the plot and fabulous setting of a grandiose theater piece.

The animal slain for food, for example, which had been summoned by a rite, had appeared as a willing sacrifice, self-offered, with the understanding that through a second rite its life would be returned for rebirth to the source. And among planting folk, in the same way of make-believe, the work of gardening, tilling and harvesting, was likened to the mysteries of begetting and of birth. Very much like a boy galloping with all his might as a mustang down a street, where he would have gone bored and weary at a walk, so primitive man, from the first we know of him, through his myths and rites turned every aspect of his work into a festival. These gave to everything a meaning not there in any practical, economic sense, but only as play, enacted dream: a grave, yet joyous, tragicomic play, to the grave and constant roles of which the young were introduced and trained by the elders of their world. To say with Emerson that a society of this type was in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members would be absolutely incorrect.

However, as we have already amply seen in the earlier volumes of this survey, a totally new situation developed in the suddenly flowering village world of the nuclear Near East, immediately following the introduction there of the arts of grain agriculture and stock-breeding, c. 7500 b.c. No longer forced to forage for their food, people settled in established villages, the number and size of which grew; and when the richly fertile mudlands of the lower Tigris-Euphrates were entered c. 4000 b.c., the rate of increase accelerated. Villages became towns; towns, cities: the first cities in the history of the world. And no longer were the functioning social units simple groups, of the order of large families, but compound, complexly functioning organisms of variously specialized classes: tillers of the soil, tradespeople, governors and the governed, craftsmen of various kinds, and professional priests. And as we have seen,^{Note 96} it was precisely at this point of space and time, in the Near East, and specifically Sumer, c. 3500–3000 b.c., that the evidence first appears among the ruins of those earliest city-states — Kish, Uruk, Ur, Lagash, Larsa, and the rest — first, of a disciplined social order imposed from above by force, and next, of deliberate expeditions of military conquest against neighbors: not the mere annihilation raids of one tribe or village horde against another, in a spirit of plunder, malice, or revenge, but deliberately progressed campaigns of systematic conquest and subjugation.

In the words of a great Orientalist, the late Professor Hans Heinrich Schaeder (1896–1957) of the Universities of Konigsberg, Berlin, and Gottingen, it was exactly here, with this epochal crisis in the history of mankind, that the world-historical process of which we ourselves are a part took its rise, its special theme, and its characteristic being: the programmatic exercise of power by men over men.

And this development took place [states Professor Schaeder], not in the way of a gradual evolution, but abruptly, in a brief span, with the coming into being of the earliest form of the state, or of anything eligible to such a name. It appears in the city-states and their rapid combinations into territorial states of the lower Tigris-Euphrates and Nile, after which, likewise, on the rivers Indus, third millennium b.c., and Hwang Ho, second millennium. All of which state foundings derived from one and the same historic process, namely, the overrunning and subjugation of earlier, locally settled tillers of the soil by conquering warrior herdsmen from Central Asia.…

Now the exercise of power is governed everywhere by the law of intensification, or as the Greeks would say, πλεονεξία, “greed for more than one’s share.” There is within it no principle of measure; measure is brought to it only from without, by counterforces that restrict it. So that history is the interaction of power, on one hand — its establishment, maintenance, and increase — and those counterforces, on the other. Various names have been given to the latter — of which the simplest and most inclusive is love. They are released when doubts arise (generally among the governed, but occasionally, also, in circles of the ruling class) conducing to a criticism of the power principle. And this criticism may develop to the radical point of an absolute renunciation of power, generating then the idea and realization of an order of life based on brotherly love and mutual aid. Self-confidence, and thereby the strength to influence others, accrues to those in this position from their belief that only in this, and not in power, which they reject, can the meaning of human existence be fulfilled. Meaning is then sought no longer in the organized powers of a state, the domination of the governed by their masters, but in individuals, giving and welcoming love.

When such an order prospers in its conversion of people, guiding them to a new life, it may bring into being a spiritual movement that nothing can stop. This is passed on, from one generation to the next, and spreads from the narrow circle of its origin over lands and continents. It succeeds, along the way, in persuading even the holders of worldly power to concede recognition — either actually or ostensibly — to its truth and obligations, and lays restraints on their will to power that are not an effect of that will itself. Twice in the history of the world, in Buddhism and in Christianity, such movements have acquired the character of world-historical powers; and in the course of their development they have themselves become infected by the will to power and mastery, which has at times even darkened them to the core. Yet both are such that they can be restored to their pristine character, in the sense of the life and teaching of their founders. Of all the spiritual movements in the history of Eurasia, it is these two that, even to our own day, offer the most abiding and dependable guarantees against that soul-destruction and degradation which the man beset by the Will to Power can render both to others and to himself.

The sequence of the periods of world-history was not produced, however, by love, but by an expansion of the power field, which in the course of a development of more than three millenniums finally brought the whole of Eurasia into its sphere, divided into separate states. This occurred by way of an interaction between the earlier city states and later conquering hordes, who either seized the mastery and extended it, or else set up new states of their own nearby on the pattern of the old.…^{Note 97}

As we have seen throughout the volumes of this study, it has been the chief concern of all these power groups, in their interpretation, formulation, and enforcement then of their rites, not so much to foster the growth of young individuals to maturity as to validate supematurally, and to render religiously unchallengeable, their own otherwise questionable authority, whether as dynasty, as tribe, or as churchly sect. The timeless symbols, taken over and recombined, are applied systematically, and with full intent, to the aims of subjugation through indoctrination. A totally new order of state beliefs and rites, to the glory of some name or other, is superimposed upon the old life-fostering order of the family and spiritual rites of passage and initiation: a “faith,” as it is called, is proposed for belief.

The Waste Land, let us say then, is any world in which (to state the problem pedagogically) force and not love, indoctrination, not education, authority, not experience, prevail in the ordering of lives, and where the myths and rites enforced and received are consequently unrelated to the actual inward realizations, needs, and potentialities of those upon whom they are impressed. It would be ridiculous to argue that such reigns of force never should have been. In the first place, here they are. In the second place, they have been the givers of everything good and great beyond the range of thought, vision, art, and civilization of Shakespeare’s apeman Caliban. And in the third place, for those caught up in the creative labor and exhilaration of their development — whether as members themselves of the creative elite by whom the new forms are advanced, or as mere hands, willing contributors, whose lives are given meaning through association — the privilege of participating in the great creative moments of world history is hardly a grant of life to be despised.

However, as Spengler has well shown in his own creative masterwork, there are moments of climacteric when the culture forms thus brought into being attain and pass their apogee. Furthermore — but here is a point for which Spengler had little sympathy — there are those, as Schaeder has pointed out, generally among the governed, but occasionally also in circles of the ruling class itself, who begin to feel uneasy about, and so to criticize, the power experience and power task of the day as the proper, sole, and highest human experience and concern. Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) was such a critic at the moment of the height of glory of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. And a like figure in the Middle Ages was the poet Jean de Meung (1240?–1305?), whose celebration of Dame Nature in his long concluding portion of the Roman de la Rose (c. 1277) corresponds curiously to the celebrated argument of Rousseau in his Discours sur les arts et sciences (1749), that the savage state (back to nature: the Noble Savage) is superior to that of civilized man. In Greece, at the time of the apogee of Athenian power and light, the cynic Diogenes (4127–323 b.c.) was such a rebel; in India the Buddha (563 —483 b.c.), rejecting caste and the rules of Brahminical social life, as well as the authority of the Vedas, stands for an identical crisis; while in China we find the Tao Te Ching (fourth century b.c.), with its summons of the spirit to “return to the root.”^{Note 98} There is in all these voices a common call — away from the fixed and the set-fast to the as yet unformed potential, the “remainder” so to say, which the rites and myths and special aims of the local group, the “collective faith,” have left unmet, untouched, and unconvinced. In the words again of Emerson:

There is one mind common to all individual men.… Of the works of this mind history is the record.… Without hurry, without rest, the human spirit goes forth from the beginning to embody every faculty, every thought, every emotion which belongs to it, in appropriate events. But the thought is always prior to the fact; all the facts of history preexist in the mind as laws.^{Note 99}

The wicked thing about both the little and the great “collective faiths,” prehistoric and historic, is that they all, without exception, pretend to hold encompassed in their ritualized mythologies all of the truth ever to be known. They are therefore cursed, and they curse all who accept them, with what I shall call the “error of the found truth,” or, in mythological language, the sin against the Holy Ghost. They set up against the revelations of the spirit the barriers of their own petrified belief, and therefore, within the ban of their control, mythology, as they shape it, serves the end only of binding potential individuals to whatever system of sentiments may have seemed to the shapers of the past (now sanctified as saints, sages, ancestors, or even gods) to be appropriate to their concept of a great society. Thus, even a period of civilization that from without, and in the historian’s view, would appear to be a golden age, might be a waste when viewed from within. To quote Ortega y Gasset:

Every culture that has triumphed and succeeded turns into a topic and a phrase. A topic is an idea that is used, not because it is evident, but because people say it. A phrase is that which is not thought out every time, but is simply said, repeated.… The culture, which in its origin, in its own moment of genuineness was simple, becomes complicated. And this complicating of the inherited culture thickens the screen between each man’s self and the things that surround him. Bit by bit his life becomes less his own and more the collective life. His individual, effective and always primitive “I” is replaced by the “I” which is “people,” by the conventional, complicated, cultivated “I.” The so-called cultivated man always appears in periods of a very advanced culture which are already made up of pure topics and phrases.

This is an inexorable process. Culture, the purest product of the live and the genuine, since it comes out of the fact that man feels with an awful anguish and a burning enthusiasm the relentless needs of which his life is made up, ends by becoming a falsification of that life. Man’s genuine self is swallowed up by his cultured, conventional, social self. Every culture or every great phase of culture ends in man’s socialization, and vice versa; socialization pulls man out of his life of solitude, which is his real and authentic life.^{Note 100}

There is no doubt that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a major threshold of cultural change had been attained. The aims of the Christian conquest of Europe had been accomplished — largely by force; the power of the papacy was at its height; the crusades were in full career; and yet from every side sounds and alarms of heresy were beginning to arise and to spread. The whole structure was cracking. For the cathedral of God’s love, the Church, and the chalice of his divine blood — the vas of his self-giving on its altar — had been turned frankly and openly to sheer force: the Church was a power-state, a super power-state, and its Pope — as well as its image of God — was a Levantine King of Kings in the perfect style of an Achaemenian Darius.

But there was a new strong wine in ferment, which the golden chalice in the priestly hands, elevated at the altar, to the pungency of incense and the chime of altar bells, the bowed heads of multitudes and the silence of angelic choirs, could no longer hold. In a sense, that age, like our own, and like the great Hellenistic age, was one in which a cross-fertilization of cultures, Oriental and European, had unsettled all local dogmas and the claims thereby of power-elites to authority from aloft. Like cells released from an organism in decay, individuals, unbound, spontaneously transferred allegiances to new, unforeseen combinations. And so it is that we find in all three of these periods of crisis analogous eruptions of pathological social phenomena, symptomatic of what Jung (following Heraclitus) has called enantiodromia: i.e., a “conversion into opposite,” a “crossing over,” a compulsive “running the other way” ; which is to say, a loss of control on the part of the conscious faculties, and exactly such an overpowering upsurge of instinctual impulse as occurred in the case of Tristan and Isolt when they drank the potion.

Certainly that was not the ideal of moraliteit that the poet Gottfried, and Tristan himself, had celebrated.* It was an overwhelming, irresistible, daemonic invasion, beyond control of the active will, and its force, finally, was as baneful in effect as any force applied in the name of king, god, or civilization from above. This was the point that Wagner recognized even at the opening of his labors on the Tristan, when he had just been overwhelmed by his discovery of the philosophy of Schopenhauer. On the surge of that inspiration, he was at work on the music of Die Walkiire, in the fall of 1854, when the conception of a Tristan opera occurred to him, and, as he tells in his autobiography:

Returning, one day, from a walk, I outlined for myself the contents of its three acts in a summary way, to serve as a base for the development of the material later on. And in the last act I introduced at that time an episode, which, finally, I did not include: namely, a visit to Tristan’s sickbed by the Grail-questing, wandering Parzival. For in my thoughts, I had identified Tristan, languishing from the wound he had received and yet not able to die of it, with Amfortas of the Grail romance.^{Note 101}

That was another of those brilliant psychological insights, such as Mann remarked in Wagner. For the wound of the Maimed King in the Castle of the Grail, as the reader perhaps recalls, was in a magical way associated with the waste and sorrow of his land. In the various versions of the legend his reception of the wound has been explained in various ways. According to the oldest extant text — the Perceval, or, as it is also called, Li Contes del Graal, of the French court poet Chretien de Troyes (1140?–1191?) — he had been wounded in a battle by a javelin thrust through both thighs, and was still in such pain that he could not mount a horse. Hence, when he desired distraction, he would have himself carried to a boat, to be rowed fishing on a river; whence he was known as the Fisher King.^{Note 102} Wagner’s source, however, was not this old French version of the romance, which remained unfinished at the time of its author’s death, but the Middle High German Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach (c. 1170–1230), where a deeply perceived sociological and psychological significance is recognized both in the wound itself and in the circumstances of the wounding of the king.

For it had been at a tender age that the Grail King Anfortas had been appointed to his sacred office. The earlier king, his father, had been slain; and he, the eldest son, a mere boy, had been chosen to succeed. Thus he was king not by virtue of his character and personal realization, but by inheritance, perforce: the role was to him (in Ortega’s terms) a topic, a phrase: unearned, unrelated to his nature. And so, as we read in Wolfram’s words:

He reached the years when his beard began to grow, the age when Love turns her malice upon youth. She then urges her beloved so compellingly that one can only say of her that she lacks honor. However, if a Lord of the Grail craves for love in a manner otherwise than prescribed, he will endure trials and most piteous anguish.^{Note 103}

The young Grail King, coming of age, rode forth therefore on adventure, like any young knight of his day, and his battle-cry was Amor.

But that cry [we read] was not at all appropriate to the spirit [required of the Grail King] of gentleness and humility. The King fared forth alone that day (which was to prove a great sorrow to his people), riding in quest of adventure, steered along by his joy in love: for love’s zeal so compelled him. And he was pierced, wounded in a joust, by a poisoned spear through his testicles, so severely he could not be healed.

A heathen it was who had there engaged him and delivered that stroke: one born in the land Ethnise, where the river Tigris flows from Paradise: one who had been confident that his battle-courage would gain the Grail for him. Its name was engraved on his heathen spear, and in quest of knightly deeds afar, he was wandering over land and sea, only for the power of the Grail. That heathen was there slain by the King; and for him too we may somewhat lament. However, when the King returned to us so pale and empty of strength, a doctor’s hand searched the wound, found the iron spearhead therein, a splinter of the shaft as well, and removed them.… Whereupon, he was immediately borne, through God’s help, to the Grail: but when he looked upon it his torture only increased, for he now was unable to die.^{Note 104}

Note the irony here and compare Mann: The heathen child of nature, born near the Earthly Paradise, rides in quest of the supreme symbol of the spirit while the authorized guardian of that symbol goes the opposite way. The young king’s name, Anfortas, from the old French Enfertez (Enfermetez), means “Infirmity.”^{Note 105} Its prophecy is fulfilled (as though by chance) when the two riders collide, to the ruin of both. Nature is then dispatched, and the guardian of the symbol of the spirit, though emptied of his virtue, is nevertheless retained by his sorrowing people in his spiritual role, ever in hope of healing, but without event.

The life-desolating effects of this separation of the reigns of nature (the Earthly Paradise) and the spirit (the Castle of the Grail) in such a way that neither touches the other but destructively, remains to this day an essential psychological problem of the Christianized Western world; and since it is at root a consequence of the basic biblical doctrine of an ontological distinction between God and his universe, creator and creature, spirit and matter (See Figure 10 and Experience and Authority.), it is a problem that has hardly altered since it first became intolerably evident at the climax of the Middle Ages. In briefest restatement: The Christian is taught that divinity is transcendent: not within himself and his world, but “out there.” I call this mythic dissociation.^{Note 106} Turning inward, he would find not divinity within, but only his own created soul, which might or might not be in proper relationship to its supposed Creator. The Old Testament doctrine held that God (x) had concluded a Covenant (R) with a certain people (c). None other enjoyed this privilege; it was unique. A relationship (R) to God was possible, consequently, only through membership in this group, this people: cRx. To which the New Testament adds that in the fullness of time a child, Jesus, begotten of God, was born of that holy race, in whom humanity (c) and divinity (x) were miraculously joined. All of us in our humanity (c) are related to that of Jesus, who in his divinity relates us to God (x). However, participation in this relationship (R) can be only by way of the Church that he founded (once thought to be single, but now of a million differing sects, any one of which might be true or false). Consequently, just as in the Old Testament view a relationship to God could be achieved only through physical birth as a member of the Holy Race, so in the New, only through baptism (spiritual birth) into membership in Christ’s Church; i.e., participation, in either case, in a specific social group. I call this the way of social identification. One equates the realm of value with one’s social affiliation, and extra ecclesiam nulla salus.

Unhappily, however, in the light of what is now known, not only of the history of the Bible and the Church, but also of the universe and evolution of species, a suspicion has been confirmed that was already dawning in the Middle Ages; namely, that the biblical myth of Creation, Fall, and Redemption is historically untrue. Hence, there has now spread throughout the Christian world a desolating sense not only of no divinity within (mythic dissociation), but also of no participation in divinity without (social identification dissolved): and that, in short, is the mythological base of the Waste Land of the modern soul, or, as it is being called these days, our “alienation.”

The sense of desolation is experienced on two levels: first the social, in a loss of identification with any spiritually compelling, structuring group; and, beyond that, the metaphysical, in a loss of any sense either of identity or of relationship with a dimension of experience, being, and rapture any more awesome than that provided by an empirically classifiable conglomerate of self-enclosed, separate, mutually irritating organisms held together only by lust (crude or sublimated) and fear (of pain and death or of boredom).

It has become fashionable to write of this broken image of a world as though it were a function of some new social construct, brought about by a combination of recent economic, scientific, and political developments: the industrial revolution, capitalism, colonialism, atom bombs, high or low taxes, or what not. In the broad prospect of our present, nearly concluded survey of the epochs of mankind, however, it can be seen that the actual nuclear problem was already present, and recognized by many, at the very peak of that great period of burgeoning French cathedrals (1150–1250) which Henry Adams characterized as representing the highest concentration of moral fervor in the history of the West. As the ravaged lives of Abelard and Heloise already had foretold as early as the first years of the twelfth century, neither human love nor human reason could much longer support the imposed irrational ordeals of an imported mythic order, out of touch with every movement of the native mind, as well as heart, and held in force only by a reign of terror. The cathedral-building passion itself, it would even seem, was but a compensatory, desperate screening effort to deny and nullify the increasingly obvious fact that the mighty image from Asia had begun to crack, disintegrate, and go asunder.

In the heart of Heloise the boon, the blessing from within — bitter-sweet — of nature’s goddess Love, had rendered the mythic threat of the fires of Hell indifferent: her love was, for Heloise, the Real. And Gottfried’s celebration, a century later, of Tristan’s willing challenge even of “an eternal death” gives further evidence of the trend in those years to accept the judgment of one’s own experience against the authority of Scripture and the Church.

On the side of Heloise’s beloved, Abelard, however — as of the young Grail King Anfortas — an altogether different order of mind was brought under pressure from the urge of the goddess within. For, as in the case of the unreadied youth whose beard had begun to grow, so in that of the middle-aged celibate theologian, the impulse to love had not been inspired by a message from the eyes to a readied “noble heart”; as his confessional letter itself declares: at the age of about thirty-six, “having hitherto lived continently,” he was “casting his eyes about.” And they lit upon a girl of eighteen, innocent, aware of his greatness, and available, as would the eyes of a wolf on a lamb.

The real greatness of Abelard, where he stands in majesty unsurpassed in his time, as Heloise in the courage of her heart, was in the kingdom, rather, of reason. For it is from the period of his sensational lectures in Paris, the first years of the twelfth century, that the beginning is dated of the end of the reign in Europe of that order of unreason, unreasoning submission to the dicta of authority, that is epitomized in the formula of the early Church Father Tertullian (1607–230?): “Credo quia ineptum: I believe because it is absurd.” “The son of God died; it is by all means to be believed,” Tertullian had written, “because it is absurd. And He was buried and rose again; the fact is certain, because it is impossible.”^{Note 107} And before that Saint Paul himself had opened the door to such impudent idiocies when he had written: “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.”^{Note 108}

Abelard, in his early thirties, still a student under Anselm of Laon, had shocked his fellows by suggesting that one should be able to study scripture for oneself, and at their urging demonstrated his point by giving, without previous training, a series of lectures on Ezekiel that proved more popular than the master’s — for which indiscretion he was expelled. In Paris he resumed the lectures, and the fame that there accrued to him as philosopher and theologian, poet and musician (a veritable Tristan of Brittany incarnate) gained for him — alas for both! — his Heloise and their destiny of calamity.

The most dangerous part of Abelard’s message, both for the faith which he held sincerely, and for his own personal safety, lay in his conviction that a knowledge of God can be attained by reason — as it had been by the Greeks — and that such knowledge, consequently, is not confined to the Christian world. At the hour of his death he was at work on a Dialogue between a Philosopher, a Jew, and a Christian^{Note 109} wherein this point was to be made and Christianity represented not as a mythology of incredible tenets, but as “the total verity, which includes all others within it.”^{Note 110} The approach to God by reason implied the reasonableness of God and that what reason cannot accept need not, and indeed cannot, be believed. “He that is hasty to trust,” Abelard once had written, “is light-minded.” Further: “The doctors of the Church should be read, not with the necessity to believe, but with liberty to judge.”^{Note 111} And to drive this last point home, in his important work Sic et Non (“Yes and No”), he presented a series of contrary opinions, drawn from the Fathers, on all the leading disputes of the theology of his time. “By doubting we are led to inquire, by inquiry we perceive the truth,” he wrote; and of those who argued that we are not to reason in matters of faith, he asked, with a cut that could not be answered:

How, then, is the faith of any people, however false, to be refuted, though it may have arrived at such a pitch of blindness as to confess some idol to be the creator both of heaven and of earth? As, according to your own admission, you cannot reason upon matters of faith, you have no right to attack others upon a matter with regard to which you think you ought yourself to be unassailed.^{Note 112}

Abelard was harried from pillar to post for his views, driven throughout his mutilated life from one monastic haven to another. On one occasion he was compelled to burn his own book with his own hands (“So it was burnt,” he wrote of this brutal event, “amid general silence”); and to read aloud then the Athanasian Creed (“the which I read amid sobs and tears as well as I might”). He was sent to a convent near Soissons, which had acquired the reputation of a penitentiary through the stern discipline of its abbot Geoffrey and his frequent use of the whip, from which he was presently released, only to fall into more trouble, and then more, until at one point he fled to a forest hermitage, to which, when it was found, students flocked, and it became itself a monastery; from which, however, he then took flight again for fear of the fierce power of that saintly lover of God’s love and singer of the Song of Songs, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux. “God knows,” he wrote of those terrible years, “that at times I fell into such despair that I proposed to myself to go off and live the life of a Christian among the enemies of Christ.”^{Note 113} Abelard was indeed Tristan as the mutilated Grail King, and he stands symbolic for his time and for the sterilization of heart, body, and mind that the Waste Land theme represents.

And yet the schoolrooms in Paris in which he had lectured became, within a generation, largely through his influence, the leading university of Europe; and it was chiefly there that the great scholastic movement came into being, of which Aquinas was to be the culminating master. The Church today is rightly proud of the intellectual splendor of this movement, which, however, in its own time, as a flowering of free creative thought, was greatly feared and finally broken. So that actually the fate of its initiator, Abelard — the Waste Land theme of the agony of his life — had been the announcement, as in a symphony, of all the passages to follow, through which, in amplification, demonstration, variation, culmination, and denouement, the same dreadful murder of light and life by grim power (the art of the systematic exercise of power by men over men) was to be rehearsed.

The optimistic aim of this movement had been to prove that Greek philosophy and biblical supernaturalism, reason and revelation, are not absolutely incompatible, but, as far as reason reaches, in accord; revelation extending, however, beyond. For example, in Aquinas’s words, from his Summa Theologica:

To know in a general and confused way that God exists is implanted in us by nature, inasmuch as God is man’s beatitude. For man naturally desires happiness, and what is naturally desired by man is naturally known by him. This, however, is not to know absolutely that God exists; just as to know that someone is approaching is not the same as to know that Peter is approaching, even though it is Peter who is approaching; for there are many who imagine that man’s perfect good, which is happiness, consists in riches, and others in pleasures, and others in something else.^{Note 114}

The Greek philosophers, most notably Aristotle, had gone, according to the schoolmen, as far as natural reason could in demonstrating questions of this kind; however, that God was a Trinity, of which Jesus Christ was the Second Person, who, furthermore, had been begotten by the Third, to be born then of a Virgin, crucified, and buried, only to rise again three days later and ascend to Heaven, where he sits now at the right hand of the First Person, no ignorant Greek, not even Aristotle, could ever have come to know — partly, of course, because nothing of the kind had yet occurred in the fourth century b.c.; but also because that is not the kind of truth to be arrived at by syllogism.

That which is proposed to be believed equally by all is equally unknown by all as an object of science [states Aquinas]. Such are the things that are of faith absolutely. Consequently, faith and science are not about the same things.

Unbelievers are in ignorance of things that are of faith, for neither do they see or know them in themselves, nor do they know them to be credible. The faithful, on the other hand, know them, not as by demonstration, but by the light of faith which makes them see that they ought to believe them. — The arguments employed by holy men to prove things that are of faith are not demonstrations; they are either persuasive arguments showing that what is proposed to our faith is not impossible, or else they are proofs drawn from the principles of faith, i.e., from the authority of Holy Scripture. Whatever is based on these principles is as well proved in the eyes of the faithful as a conclusion drawn from self-evident principles is in the eyes of all. Hence, theology is a science.…^{Note 115}

Dante in his Divina Commedia, half a century after Aquinas’s Summa, represented the logic of this hierarchy of truths — natural and supernatural, reasonable and revealed — in his imagery of the two guides of his soul, Virgil and Beatrice. The first, the pagan poet, conducts the confused Christian out of the dangerous “dark wood,” safely past the pits of Hell and up the World Mountain of Purgatory, to the Earthly Paradise on its summit. There, however, Beatrice greets him, to become his guide aloft, in Christian charity and faith, to the beatific vision of God.

Not all, however, nor even a majority, of the creative spirits of those centuries, striving to bring Moses, Paul, and Aristotle to their knees together before the tabernacle of the consecrated Host, were found by the authorities to be facing in the right direction. Creativity, after all, is not conformity, and there was a lot going on in the young universities of those days that could not be brought into fellowship with the Athanasian Creed. For instance, the most celebrated Averroist of Aquinas’s time, the Master Siger of Brabant — who had the luck to have left France before the French inquisitor Simon du Val arrived, November 23, 1277, to apprehend and question him — is reported to have put forward, if not actually to have held, such views (suggesting Asia) as the following: That the created world is eternal and that, since the world is eternal, the same species of creatures are bound to reappear, so to speak in a circular way, succeeding each other in the same order as before, and so on indefinitely. Further, that the supreme felicity of man in this life formally consists in the intellectual act by which his intellect understands the essence of the intellect that is God; and moreover, that for the human intellect the intellection by which God is understood is God himself.^{Note 116}

On January 18, 1277, therefore, three years after Aquinas’s death, Pope John XXI wrote to the Bishop of Paris, Etienne Tempier, to ascertain the number, nature, and sources of the reported “errors” then being circulated in his precinct; and on March 7 of the same fateful year the bishop, accordingly, issued a stunning condemnation of no less than two hundred and nineteen philosophical propositions, which delivered the coup de grâce to philosophy as an exercise within the sanctuary of the Church. A few days later the Archbishop of Canterbury endorsed this so-called Condemnation of 1277, and on April 28 a second letter of Pope John prescribed measures for its implementation. Among the propositions scored were the following (and what is most remarkable and significant here is the fact that we do not possess the books or even know the names of the authors of any of these thoughts; so that were it not for their mention in this condemnation, we should not have known that such thoughts arose and were taught in the Middle Ages):

That the Christian religion hinders education. That there are falsehoods and errors in the Christian religion as in all others. That one does not know more for knowing theology. That what the theologians say rests upon myths. That true wisdom is the wisdom of the philosophers, not of theologians, and that therefore there is no state superior to the practice of philosophy. That man’s good is in the rational sciences, from which knowledge flow the natural moral virtues described by Aristotle, these making up all the happiness accessible to man in this life, after which there is no other. That there are no other virtues possible, none supematurally infused; and that we should therefore return to those virtues that Aristotle reserves for an elite and which are not made for the poor. That if the world is eternal, it is because God cannot not produce it, and if the world is such as it is, it is because God cannot produce it other than it is. For from the first principle, which is one, there can come only a single effect, which is similar to it; God, therefore, cannot immediately and freely produce a plurality of effects, but the multiplicity of things presupposes a multiplicity of intermediary causes whose existence is necessarily required for their own.

This 28th condemned proposition is to be carefully noted [comments Professor Gilson], for it is of capital importance for the understanding of the subsequent history of medieval philosophy and theology: the Primary Principle can be the cause of different effects here below only through the medium of other causes, because nothing which transmutes can effect transmutations of several sorts, without itself being transmuted. To maintain this principle was radically to deny the liberty and omnipotence of the Christian God. The Jewish and Christian God was not only able to create at a single stroke the world with the multiplicity of beings it holds, he still could intervene in it freely at any instant, either directly to create in it human souls or to act miraculously and without the intervention of secondary causes; between Yahweh and the Greco-Arabian god* *N.B. The Greco-Arabian god here meant is not the god of the Qu'ran, but the god described by the philosophers and already condemned by Moslem orthodoxy a century and a half before the blast from Paris.from whom effects proceed one by one and according to a necessary order no conciliation was possible. Before the condemnation, Philip the Chancellor, William of Auvergne, Bonaventure, and others had already perceived their incompatibility; from 1277 on, all the theologians knew it. The condemnation of 1277 is a landmark in the history of mediaeval philosophy and theology.… Instead of carrying on its effort to conquer philosophy by renovating it, scholasticism acted on the defensive. At that very moment, its golden age came to an end.^{Note 117}

And at that very moment, also, institutional Christianity was finished as a creative force in European life. For not only had its God dropped back once more into the Bible, but there were presently two popes, then three (the Great Schism 1377–1417); after which, two Christianities, then a hundred (Martin Luther, 1483–1546). And meanwhile the new theological tone had been set by the powerful chancellor of the still supreme University of Paris, John Gerson (d. 1429), the pious power-man chiefly responsible for the execution of John Huss,^{Note 118} the whole sense of whose influential work entitled Against Vain Curiosity in Matters of Faith (1402, 1403) he himself epitomized in the words from the Gospel according to Mark 1:15: “Repent and believe the gospel.” That, for him, was the whole of Christianity. And from there to our contemporary great Protestant, Karl Barth, with his “leap of faith,” or back the other way to Paul and Tertullian — credo quia ineptum — where (exactly where?) is creative thought?