The Directorate of the Order and the Assembly of Masters have taken note of your warmhearted and perspicacious circular letter with more than ordinary interest. We have found your historical observations no less absorbing than your ominous picture of the future, and some of us will undoubtedly long continue to ponder and to draw profit from your reflections, which surely are not groundless. We have all recognized, with gladness and deep appreciation, the principles that inspire you, the truly Castalian principles of altruism. We see that you are motivated by a profound and by now almost instinctive love for our Province, for its life and its customs, a concerned and at the moment somewhat overanxious love. With equal gladness and appreciation we observe the personal overtones of that love, its spirit of sacrifice, its active impulse, its earnestness and zeal, and its heroic element. In all this we recognize the character of our Glass Bead Game Master as we know it; we see his energy, his ardor, his daring. How characteristic of the famous Benedictine’s disciple that he does not study history as a mere scholarly end in itself, an aesthetic game to be regarded without emotion, but rather applies his historical knowledge directly to current needs; that his perceptions impel him to take certain measures. And, revered colleague, how perfectly it corresponds with your character that you should feel drawn not to political missions, not to posts of influence and honor, but to the role of simple Ludi Magister, that of a schoolmaster.
Such are some of the impressions, some of the thoughts that were awakened by the very first reading of your circular letter. Most of your colleagues responded in much the same way. The Board has not, however, been able to take a stand on your warnings and requests. We have met and held a lively discussion of your view that our very existence is threatened. Much was said about the nature, extent, and possible imminence of the dangers. The majority of our members obviously took these questions most seriously indeed, and grew quite heated in discussing them. But we are compelled to inform you that on none of these questions did a majority favor your view. The imaginative power and farsightedness of your historico-political observations was acknowledged; but none of your specific conjectures, or shall we say prophecies, was fully approved. None was accepted as wholly convincing. Only a few of us agreed with you (and then with reservations) even on the question of the degree to which the Order and our Castalian system has shared the responsibility for the unusually long era of peace, or whether the Order can even be held a factor in political history. In the view of the majority, the calm that has descended upon our Continent must be ascribed partly to the general prostration following the bloodlettings of the terrible wars, but far more to the fact that the Occident has ceased to be the focal point of world history and the arena in which claims to hegemony are fought out. Certainly we would not wish to cast doubt upon the true achievements of our Order. Nevertheless, we cannot grant that the Castalian ideal, the ideal of high culture under the aegis of disciplined meditation, has any powers to shape history, any vital influence upon world political conditions. Urges or ambitions of this sort are totally alien to the Castalian mentality. Several serious disquisitions on the subject have stressed the point that Castalia seeks neither political sway nor influence on peace or war. Indeed, there could be no question of Castalia’s having any such purpose, so the argument has gone, because everything Castalian is related to reason and operates within the framework of rationality — which certainly could not be said of world history, or said only by someone willing to revert to the theological and poetic sentimentalities of romantic historical philosophy. From that vantage point, of course, the whole murderous, destructive course of political history could be explained as merely the method of cosmic Reason. Moreover, even the most casual survey of the history of thought shows that the great ages of culture have never been adequately explained by political conditions. Rather, culture, or mind, or soul, has its own independent history — a second, secret, bloodless, and sanctified history — running parallel to what is generally called world history, by which we mean incessant struggles for material power. Our Order deals only with this sanctified and secret history, not with “real,” brutal world history. It can never be our task to be continually taking soundings in political history, let alone to help to shape it.
