The Glass Bead Game (23 page)

In the library, the one place where he habitually met Anton, he also made the acquaintance of a man he had at first almost failed to notice, so modest was his appearance. In time, however, he was to know him very well indeed, and to love him for the rest of his life with the kind of grateful reverence he felt, otherwise, only toward the now retired Music Master. The man was Father Jacobus, perhaps the most eminent historian of the Benedictine Order. He was at that time about sixty, a spare, elderly man with a sparrow hawk's head on a long, sinewy neck. Seen from the front, his face had something dull and lifeless about it, since he was chary of gazing outward; but his profile, with the boldly curved line of the forehead, the deep furrow above the sharp bridge of his hooked nose, and the rather short but attractively shaped chin, suggested a definite and original personality.

This quiet old man—who, incidentally, on closer acquaintance could be extremely vivacious—had a table of his own in a small room off the main hall of the library. Though the monastery possessed such priceless books, he seemed to be the only really serious working scholar in the place. It was, by the way, the novice Anton who by chance called Joseph Knecht's attention to Father Jacobus. Knecht had noticed that the room in which the scholar had his table was regarded almost as a private domain. The few users of the library entered it only if they had to, and then moved softly and respectfully on tiptoe, although the Father bent over his books did not appear to be easily disturbed. Knecht, of course, quickly imitated this circumspection, and thereby remained at a remove from the industrious old man.

One day, however, when Anton had brought Father Jacobus some books, Knecht noticed how the young man lingered a moment at the open door of the study, looking back at the scholar already absorbed in his work again. There was adoration in Anton's face, an expression of admiration and reverence mingled with those emotions of affectionate consideration and helpfulness that well-bred youth sometimes manifests toward the paltriness and fragility of age. Knecht's first reaction was delight; the sight was pleasing in itself, as well as evidence that Anton could so look up to older men without any trace of physical feeling. A rather sarcastic thought followed immediately, a thought Joseph felt almost ashamed of: how poor the state of scholarship must be in this institution that the only seriously active scholar in the place was stared at as if he were a fabulous beast. Nevertheless, Anton's look of reverent admiration for the old man opened Knecht's eyes. He became aware of the learned Father's existence. He himself took to throwing a glance now and then at the man, discovered his Roman profile, and gradually found out one thing and another about Father Jacobus which seemed to suggest a most extraordinary mind and character. Knecht had already learned that he was a historian and regarded as the foremost authority on the history of the Benedictine Order.

One day the Father spoke to him. His manner of speech had none of the broad, deliberately benevolent, deliberately good-natured, somewhat avuncular tone which seemed to be the style of the monastery. Speaking in a low and almost timorous voice, but placing his stresses with a wonderful precision, he invited Joseph to visit him in his room after vespers. “You will find in me,” he said, “neither a specialist on the history of Castalia nor a Glass Bead Game player. But since, as it now seems, our two so different Orders are forming ever-closer ties of friendship, I should not wish to exclude myself, and would be happy to take personal advantage now and then of your presence among us.”

He spoke with utter seriousness, but his low voice and shrewd old face conferred upon his all-too-polite phrases that wonderful note of equivocation, ranging through the whole compass from earnestness to irony, from deference to faint mockery, from passionate engagement to playfulness, such as may be sensed when two holy men or two princes of the Church greet each other with endless bows in a game of mutual courtesies and trial of patience. This blending of superiority and mockery, of wisdom and obstinate ceremonial, was deeply familiar to Joseph Knecht from his studies of Chinese language and life. He found it marvelously refreshing, and realized that it was some time since he had last heard this tone—which, among others, the Glass Bead Game Master Thomas commanded with consummate skill. With gratitude and pleasure, Joseph accepted the invitation.

That evening he called at the Father's rather isolated apartment at the end of a quiet side-wing of the monastery. As he stood in the corridor, wondering which door to knock at, he heard piano music, to his considerable surprise. It was a sonata by Purcell, played unpretentiously and without virtuosity, but cleanly and in impeccable tempo. The pure music sounded through the door; its heartfelt gaiety and sweet triads reminded him of the days in Waldzell when he had practiced pieces of this sort on various instruments with his friend Ferromonte. He waited, listening with deep enjoyment, for the end of the sonata. In the still, twilit corridor it sounded so lonely and unworldly, and so brave and innocent also, both childlike and superior, as all good music must in the midst of the unredeemed muteness of the world.

He knocked at the door. Father Jacobus called, “Come in,” and received him with his unassuming dignity. Two candles were still burning by the small piano. “Yes,” Father Jacobus said in answer to Knecht's question, “I play for a half-hour or even an hour every night. I usually call a halt to my day's work when darkness falls and would rather not read or write during the hours before sleep.”

They talked about music, about Purcell, Handel, the ancient musical tradition among the Benedictines—of all the Catholic Orders the one most devoted to the arts. Knecht expressed a desire to know something of the history of the Order. The conversation grew lively and touched on a hundred questions. The old monk's historical knowledge seemed to be truly astounding, but he frankly admitted that the history of Castalia, of the Castalian idea and Order, had not interested him. He had scarcely studied it, he said, and did not conceal his critical attitude toward this Castalia whose “Order” he regarded as an imitation of the Christian models, and fundamentally a blasphemous imitation since the Castalian Order had no religion, no God, and no Church as its basis. Knecht listened respectfully, but pointed out that other than Benedictine and Roman Catholic views of religion, God and the Church were possible, and moreover had existed, and that it would not do to deny the purity of their intentions nor their profound influence on the life of the mind.

“Quite so,” Jacobus said. “No doubt you are thinking of the Protestants, among others. They were unable to preserve religion and the Church, but at times they displayed a great deal of courage and produced some exemplary men. I spent some years studying the various attempts at reconciliation among the hostile Christian denominations and churches, especially those of the period around 1700, when we find such people as the philosopher and mathematician Leibniz and that eccentric Count Zinsendorf endeavoring to reunite the inimical brothers. Altogether, the eighteenth century, hasty and shallow though it often seems in its judgments, has such a rich and many-faceted intellectual history. The Protestants of that period strike me as particularly interesting. There was one man I discovered, a philologist, teacher, and educator of great stature—a Swabian Pietist, by the way—whose moral influence can be clearly traced for two hundred years after his death. But that is another subject. Let us return to the question of the legitimacy and historical mission of real Orders.…”

“Oh no,” Joseph Knecht broke in. “Please say more about this teacher you have just mentioned. I almost think I can guess who he is.”

“Guess.”

“I thought at first of Francke of Halle, but since you say he was a Swabian I can think of none other than Johann Albrecht Bengel.”

Jacobus laughed. An expression of pleasure transfigured his face. “You surprise me, my friend,” he exclaimed. “It was indeed Bengel I had in mind. How do you happen to know of him? Or is it normal in your astonishing Province that people know such abstruse and forgotten things and names? I would vouch that if you were to ask all the Fathers, teachers, and pupils in our monastery, and those of the last few generations as well, not one would know this name.”

“In Castalia, too, few would know it, perhaps no one besides myself and two of my friends. I once engaged in studies of eighteenth century Pietism for private reasons, and as it happened I was much impressed by several Swabian theologians—chief among them Bengel. At the time he seemed to me the ideal teacher and guide for youth. I was so taken with the man that I even had a photo made of his portrait in an old book, and kept it above my desk.”

Father Jacobus continued to chuckle. “Our meeting is certainly taking place under unusual auspices,” he said. “It is remarkable enough that you and I should both have come upon this forgotten man in the course of our studies. Perhaps it is even more remarkable that this Swabian Protestant should have been able to influence both a Benedictine monk and a Castalian Glass Bead Game player. Incidentally, I imagine that your Glass Bead Game is an art requiring a great deal of imagination, and wonder that so stringently sober a man as Bengel should have attracted you.”

Knecht, too, chuckled with amusement. “Well,” he said, “if you recall that Bengel devoted years of study to the Revelation of St. John, and what sort of system he devised for interpreting its prophecies, you will have to admit that our friend could be the very opposite of sober.”

“That is true,” Father Jacobus admitted gaily. “And how do you explain such contradictions?”

“If you will permit me a joke, I would say that what Bengel lacked, and unconsciously longed for, was the Glass Bead Game. You see, I consider him among the secret forerunners and ancestors of our Game.”

Cautiously, once again entirely in earnest, Jacobus countered: “It strikes me as rather bold to annex Bengel, of all people, for your pedigree. How do you justify it?”

“It was only a joke, but a joke that can be defended. While he was still quite young, before he became engrossed in his great work on the Bible, Bengel once told friends of a cherished plan of his. He hoped, he said, to arrange and sum up all the knowledge of his time, symmetrically and synoptically, around a central idea. That is precisely what the Glass Bead Game does.”

“After all, the whole eighteenth century toyed with the encyclopedic idea,” Father Jacobus protested.

“So it did,” Joseph agreed. “But what Bengel meant was not just a juxtaposition of the fields of knowledge and research, but an interrelationship, an organic denominator. And that is one of the basic ideas of the Glass Bead Game. In fact, I would go further in my claims: if Bengel had possessed a system similar to that offered by our Game, he probably would have been spared all the misguided effort involved in his calculation of the prophetic numbers and his annunciation of the Antichrist and the Millennial Kingdom. Bengel did not quite find what he longed for: the way to channel all his various talents toward a single goal. Instead, his mathematical gifts in association with his philological bent produced that weird blend of pedantry and wild imagination, the ‘order of the ages,' which occupied him for so many years.”

“It is fortunate you are not a historian,” Jacobus commented. “You tend to let your own imagination run away with you. But I understand what you mean. I am myself a pedant only in my own discipline.”

It was a fruitful conversation, out of which sprang mutual understanding and a kind of friendship. It seemed to the Benedictine scholar more than coincidence, or at least a very special kind of coincidence, that the two of them—each operating within his own, Benedictine or Castalian, limitations—should have discovered this poor instructor at a Württemberg monastery, this man at once fine-strung and rock-hard, at once visionary and practical. Father Jacobus concluded that there must be something linking the two of them for the same unspectacular magnet to affect them both so powerfully. And from that evening on, which had begun with the Purcell sonata, that link actually existed. Jacobus enjoyed the exchange of views with so well trained yet still so supple a young mind; this was a pleasure he did not often have. And Knecht found his association with the historian, and the education Jacobus provided, a new stage on the path of awakening—that path which he nowadays identified as his life. To put the matter succinctly: from Father Jacobus he learned history. He learned the laws and contradictions of historical studies and historiography. And beyond that, in the following years he learned to see the present and his own life as historical realities.

Their talks often grew into regular disputations, with formal attacks and rebuttals. In the beginning it was Father Jacobus who proved to be the more aggressive of the pair. The more deeply he came to know his young friend's mind, the more he regretted that so promising a young man should have grown up without the discipline of a religious education, rather in the pseudo-discipline of an intellectual and aesthetic system of thought. Whenever he found something objectionable in Knecht's way of thinking, he blamed it on that “modern” Castalian spirit with its abstruseness and its fondness for frivolous abstractions. And whenever Knecht surprised him by wholesome views and remarks akin to his own thought, he exulted because his young friend's sound nature had so well withstood the damage of Castalian education. Joseph took this criticism of Castalia very calmly, repelling the attacks only when the old scholar seemed to him to have gone too far in his passion. But among the good Father's belittling remarks about Castalia were some whose partial truth Joseph had to admit, and on one point he changed his mind completely during his stay in Mariafels. This had to do with the relationship of Castalian thought to world history, any sense of which, Father Jacobus said, was totally lacking in Castalia. “You mathematicians and Glass Bead Game players,” he would say, “have distilled a kind of world history to suit your own tastes. It consists of nothing but the history of ideas and of art. Your history is bloodless and lacking in reality. You know all about the decay of Latin syntax in the second or third centuries and don't know a thing about Alexander or Caesar or Jesus Christ. You treat world history as a mathematician does mathematics, in which nothing but laws and formulas exist, no reality, no good and evil, no time, no yesterday, no tomorrow, nothing but an eternal, shallow mathematical present.”