Joseph regarded this partial conquest of Father Jacobus as a personal cause for rejoicing. He remained unaware that the authorities considered it the utmost of his accomplishments on his mission to Mariafels. Now and again he wondered in vain what was the real reason for his assignment to the monastery. Though initially it had seemed to be a promotion and distinction envied by his competitors, could it not signify a form of inglorious premature retirement, a relegation to a dead end? But then one could learn something everywhere, so why not here too? On the other hand, from the Castalian point of view this monastery, Father Jacobus alone excepted, was certainly no garden of learning or model of scholarship. He wondered, too, whether his isolation among nothing but unexacting dilettantes was not already affecting his prowess in the Glass Bead Game. He could not quite tell whether he was losing ground. For all his uncertainty, however, he was helped by his lack of ambition as well as his already quite advanced
The reader of this biographical sketch may possibly be waiting for an account of another side of Knecht’s experience in the monastery, namely the religious side. But we can venture only some tentative hints. It is certainly likely that Knecht had some deeply felt encounter with religion, with Christianity as daily-practiced in the monastery. In fact from some of his later remarks and attitudes it is quite clear that he did. But whether and to what extent he became a Christian is a question we must leave unanswered; these realms are closed to our researches. In addition to the respect for religions generally cultivated in Castalia, Knecht had a kind of inner reverence which we would scarcely be wrong to call pious. Moreover, he had already been well instructed in the schools on the classical forms of Christian doctrine, especially in connection with his studies of church music. Above all he was well acquainted with the sacramental meaning and ritual of the Mass.
With a good deal of astonishment as well as reverence, he had found among the Benedictines a living religion which he had hitherto known only theoretically and historically. He attended many services, and after he had familiarized himself with some of the writings of Father Jacobus, and taken to heart some of their talks, he became fully aware of how phenomenal this Christianity was — a religion that through the centuries had so many times become unmodern and outmoded, antiquated and rigid, but had repeatedly recalled the sources of its being and thereby renewed itself, once again leaving behind those aspects which in their time had been modern and victorious. He did not seriously resist the idea, presented to him every so often in those talks, that perhaps Castalian culture was merely a secularized and transitory offshoot of Christian culture in its Occidental form, which would some day be reabsorbed by its parent. Even if that were so, he once remarked to Father Jacobus, his, Joseph Knecht’s, own place lay within the Castalian and not the Benedictine system; he had to serve the former, not the latter, and prove himself within it. His task was to work for the system of which he was a member, without asking whether it could claim perpetual existence, or even a long span of life. He could only regard conversion as a rather undignified form of escape, he said. In similar fashion Johann Albrecht Bengel, whom they both venerated, had in his time served a small and transitory sect without neglecting his duties to the Eternal. Piety, which is to say faithful service and loyalty up to the point of sacrificing one’s life, was part and parcel of every creed and every stage of individual development; such service and loyalty were the only valid measure of devoutness.
