Who He Is
The second pedagogue of the novel, boarding-house neighbor of Lodovico Settembrini, professor of ancient languages and former student of a Jesuit seminary. The first image the text fixes of him is all in angles.
The first image the text fixes of him is all in angles:
Everything about him seemed sharp: the aquiline nose that dominated his face, the thin, compressed lips, the thick lenses of his light-framed glasses, behind which shone eyes of a pale gray, even the silence the man kept, which made one suppose that his way of speaking would also be incisive and logical.
Trajectory
The biography, told in the section Operationes spirituales, explains where the violence of his doctrines comes from: his father, a Jewish ritual butcher, dies crucified in a riot; the orphan is taken in by a Jesuit, converts at the Stella Matutina college, and is stopped by illness before the priesthood.
His father, Elia Naphta, dies in a riot provoked by the unexplained death of two Christian children:
they found him crucified, nailed by spikes to the door of his burning house.
He did not progress beyond the subdiaconate [...] and as the hemoptysis recurred, and the fever showed no sign of yielding, he had to submit, at the cost of his vocation, to a prolonged treatment.
In the room lined with silk he argues, against Settembrini, that there is no neutral knowledge in relation to faith, and arrives at the necessity of terror.
The legitimacy of the ecclesiastical conception of science is beyond dispute, and it can be summed up in the words of Saint Augustine: "I believe in order to understand".
We already know that power is evil. But, for the kingdom to come, it is necessary to suspend for a moment the dualism between good and evil, here and beyond, spirit and arbitrariness, and to unite them in a principle that combines asceticism and dominion. This is what I call the necessity of terror.
He argues that illness, and not health, is what makes man human, and beside the body of Joachim Ziemssen he keeps up the duel of doctrines.
the more ill, the more human, and the genius of illness is more human than the genius of health.
To Naphta's sarcastic remark about the humanist's distress, Naphta himself adds, still beside the body of Joachim:
The error of the men of letters lies in the belief that only the spirit makes people decent. In reality, what happens is rather the opposite. Only where spirit is lacking does decency exist.
In Chapter VII: Peeperkorn, the Great Boredom, and the Thunder, with his health getting worse, he justifies his own method by radical skepticism and, in the duel, shoots himself in the head.
Naphta answers the insult by justifying his own pedagogical method with a phrase that sums up his entire philosophy:
It is only from radical skepticism, from moral chaos, that the absolute is born, the sacred terror of which our age is in want.
The outcome of the duel is narrated without metaphor: Settembrini fires into the air, Naphta calls him a coward andraised the pistol in a manner that had nothing more to do with a combat, and discharged it into his own head.
Themes Embodied
The standard themes that pass through him are Faith, Power, and Violence.
The two deaths can be read as the price of a conviction carried to the end: Peeperkorn kills himself when feeling fails, and Naphta, after calling Settembrini a coward, discharges the pistol into his own head, without the text saying why.
Relationships
- Lodovico Settembrini: the doctrinal adversary, whom he forces into the duel.
- Hans Castorp: the contested disciple, who, far from him and in front of Settembrini, describes him as a Jesuit with a damp little spot, the same figure Clavdia used against him.
- Pieter Peeperkorn: also kills himself, in Chapter VII.