The Glass Bead Game

by Hermann Hesse

  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 Wurttemberg 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."

  "But how is anyone to study history without attempting to bring order into it?" Knecht asked.

  "Of course one should bring order into history," Jacobus thundered. "Every science is, among other things, a method of ordering, simplifying, making the indigestible digestible for the mind. We think we have recognized a few laws in history and try to apply them to our investigations of historical truth. Suppose an anatomist is dissecting a body. He does not confront wholly surprising discoveries. Rather, he finds beneath the epidermis a congeries of organs, muscles, tendons, and bones which generally conform to a pattern he has brought to his work. But if the anatomist sees nothing but his pattern, and ignores the unique, individual reality of his object, then he is a Castalian, a Glass Bead Game player; he is using mathematics on the least appropriate object. I have no quarrel with the student of history who brings to his work a touchingly childish, innocent faith in the power of our minds and our methods to order reality; but first and foremost he must respect the incomprehensible truth, reality, and uniqueness of events. Studying history, my friend, is no joke and no irresponsible game. To study history one must know in advance that one is attempting something fundamentally impossible, yet necessary and highly important. To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning. It is a very serious task, young man, and possibly a tragic one."

  Among the remarks of Father Jacobus which Knecht at the time quoted in letters to his friends, here is one more characteristic outburst:

  "Great men are to youth like the raisins in the cake of world history. They are also part of its actual substance, of course, and it is not so simple and easy as might be thought to distinguish the really great men from the pseudo-greats. Among the latter, it is the historical moment itself, and their ability to foresee its coming and seize it, that gives them the semblance of greatness. Quite a few historians and biographers, to say nothing of journalists, consider this ability to divine and seize upon a historical moment--in other words, temporary success--as in itself a mark of greatness. The corporal who becomes a dictator overnight, or the courtesan who for a while controls the good or ill humor of a ruler of the world, are favorite figures of such historians. And idealistically minded youths, on the other hand, most love the tragic failures, the martyrs, those who came on the scene a moment too soon or too late. For me, since I am after all chiefly a historian of our Benedictine Order, the most attractive and amazing aspects of history, and the most deserving of study, are not individuals and not coups, triumphs, or downfalls; rather I love and am insatiably curious about such phenomena as our congregation. For it is one of those long-lived organizations whose purpose is to gather, educate, and reshape men's minds and souls, to make a nobility of them, not by eugenics, not by blood, but by the spirit--a nobility as capable of serving as of ruling. In Greek history I was fascinated not by the galaxy of heroes and not by the obtrusive shouting in the Agora, but by efforts such as those of the Pythagorean brotherhood or the Platonic Academy. In Chinese history no other feature is so striking as the longevity of the Confucian system. And in our own Occidental history the Christian Church and the Orders which serve it as part of its structure, seem to me historical elements of the foremost importance. The fact that an adventurer contrives to conquer or found a kingdom which lasts twenty, fifty, or even a hundred years, or that a well-meaning idealist on a royal or imperial throne once in a while brings greater honesty into politics, or attempts to carry some visionary cultural project to fruition; that under high pressure a nation or other community has been capable of incredible feats of achievement and suffering--all that in
terests me far less than the ever-recurrent efforts to establish such organizations as our Order, and that some of these efforts have endured for a thousand or two thousand years. I shall say nothing of holy Church itself; for us believers it is beyond discussion. But that communities such as the Benedictines, the Dominicans, later the Jesuits and others, have survived for centuries and, despite their ups and downs, the assaults upon them, and the adaptations they have made, retain their face and their voice, their gesture, their individual soul--this is, for me, the most remarkable and meritorious phenomenon in history."

  Knecht even admired Father Jacobus's spells of angry unfairness. At the time, however, he had no notion of who Father Jacobus really was. He regarded him solely as a profound and brilliant scholar and was unaware that here was someone who was consciously participating in world history, and helping to shape it as the leading statesman of his Order. As an expert in contemporary politics as well as political history, Father Jacobus was constantly being approached from many sides for information, advice, and mediation. For some two years, up to the time of his first vacation, Knecht continued to think of Father Jacobus solely as a scholar, knowing no more of the man's life, activity, reputation, and influence than the monk cared to reveal. The learned Father knew how to keep his counsel, even in friendship; and his brothers in the monastery were also far abler at concealment than Joseph would have imagined.

  After some two years Knecht had adapted to the life in the monastery as perfectly as any guest and outsider could. From time to time he had helped the organist modestly continue the thin thread of an ancient and great tradition in the monastery's small chorus of motet singers. He had made several finds in the monastic musical archives and had sent to Waldzell, and especially to Monteport, several copies of old works. He had trained a small beginners' class of Glass Bead Game players, among whom the most zealous pupil was young Anton. He had taught Abbot Gervasius no Chinese, but had at least imparted the technique of manipulating the yarrow sticks and an improved method of meditating on the aphorisms in the Book of Oracles. The Abbot had grown accustomed to him, and had long since stopped trying to coax his guest into taking an occasional glass of wine. The semiannual reports sent by the Abbot to the Glass Bead Game Master, in reply to official inquiries as to the usefulness of Joseph Knecht, were full of praise. In Castalia, the lesson plans and marks in Knecht's Game course were scrutinized even more closely than these reports; the middling level of instruction was recognized, but the Castalian authorities were satisfied with the way the teacher had adapted to this level and, in general, to the customs and the spirit of the monastery. They were even more pleased, and truly surprised--although they kept this to themselves--by his frequent and friendly association with the famous Father Jacobus.