Today's commentary from Dr Andrew Kania intersects at a number of valuable points with on-going discussions we're having here on Catholica. The main one is the challenge facing institutional religion in maintaining its relevance in Western society. His commentary is drawn from the research he's been engaged in at Oxford University into the Mystical Theology of the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, Dag Hammarskjöld. A second point of intersection then might be the on-going discussion we have about the value of mysticism to spirituality. Dr Kania doesn't give much away here on that subject but maybe we might induce him to open up on the question, with this serving as the introduction to a later commentary examining the place of mysticism either from the perspective of his research, or from his equally steeped interest in Eastern Catholicism. This is quality adult discussion of spirituality at its very best.

Sweden — a country long without religious freedom…

The story of Dag Hammarskjöld's journey into the world of mystical theology cannot be told without knowing something of the religious and social context he had experienced in his child- and young adulthood. At the time of Hammarskjöld's birth in 1905, Sweden was in the grip of economic change. This was not the Sweden of Volvo, SAAB, Ikea, ABB and 'free love'; it was a nation that had but narrowly averted widespread famine in the 19th Century. Astonishingly by the early 20th Century, the second largest Swedish city, in terms of Swedish inhabitants after Stockholm, was not Gothenburg, but Chicago. Some 1.3 million Swedes had left in the hope that a modicum of the prosperity of the New World would come to them, if they were but willing to journey to it. The Hammarskjöld family however had no cause to contemplate migration — for they were among the very architects of the ruling elite.

In terms of the religious climate, it would take another 50 years after Hammarskjöld's birth for the restrictions on religious freedom with regard to the non-State Lutheran Church denominations to be repealed; and an additional half century later before the notion of a State Church was eventually to be abolished. By the mid 20th Century, close to the time that Dag Hammarskjöld, was to take up his post as Secretary-General of the United Nations, championing basic human rights for the world's peoples, Time Magazine would present a damning report on the lack of religious freedom in Sweden. According to that publication:

"In Sweden, as in all Scandinavian countries, religious liberty has developed only gradually since Lutheranism became supreme in the 16th Century; until a law was passed in 1860 recognizing dissident churches, any attempt to get a Lutheran to change his confession was a penal offense, and apostasy from the state church made a Swede liable to banishment for life.

Since 1860 much progress has been made, but it has been slow. … With the recent publication of a 390-page report on religious freedom, written by a six-man "Dissenter Law Committee" after five years of hearings and deliberations, Sweden has now made a move in the direction of greater religious freedom. The committee's recommendations, due for careful study before introduction into Parliament next spring, contain six major points: Any Swede would be free to leave the Lutheran Church without joining any other Christian community (he is now required to join another Christian church). • All non-Lutheran pastors would be allowed to officiate at weddings (only Lutherans, Methodists, Jews and Roman Catholics may now do so). • Permission to establish Catholic convents and monasteries in Sweden, denied since 1595, would once again be granted. • Teachers of all Christian denominations would be allowed to teach in all school levels (non-Lutherans are now barred from teaching in elementary schools). • Non-Lutherans would have to pay only one-half of their present national church tax (under the present law, most Swedes must contribute about 1% of their income to help support the state church). • Non-members of the state church, currently barred from all cabinet posts, would be eligible for any cabinet posts except those dealing with education and religion.

Non-Lutherans gave the report a restrained welcome. Last week Eric Ruden, general secretary of Sweden's Baptist Union (40,000 members), said: "The most important question . . . abolition of the state church, has not been touched. This is a step forward … but we want religious freedom as in the United States …". [Time Magazine, 4 July 1949]

One of the highest standards of living but least religious…

As the 20th Century came to a close, the Swedish nation would enjoy one of the highest material standards of living of any nation in the world, but in addition, would become equally known as one of the least religious nations in the developed world in terms of active church participation, with only 2% of members of the Church of Sweden attending Sunday service. The depletion of numbers on church pews would provide much of the theological impetus for the idea of the 'invisible church', an argument that suggested that instead of praying formally in church each Sunday, members of the church were now praying privately at home. Perhaps. Yet the eventual loosened grip of the Church of Sweden as a State Church, at the beginning of a new millennium, it would seem, had come at a time when the naves of the Swedish Church had virtually been emptied. Thus the question of whether the State Church had loosened her grip in a spirit of metanoia, or whether the members of the church had first loosened theirs thus forcing the inevitable upon the State Church, is indeed a valid one.

The spirituality of Dag Hammarskjöld…

Dag Hammarskjöld – claimed his closest spiritual guides were to be found in "the writings of those great Medieval Mystics"!

Anyone choosing to study Hammarskjöld must therefore place him into the context that much of what he devoted himself to in the field of mystical theology, was in direct contradiction to the Church of Sweden and the religious climate of his day. Outside of Albert Schweitzer, the closest spiritual guides that Dag Hammarskjöld, had, in his words, were to be found in: "the writings of those great Medieval Mystics" [Public Papers of the Secretaries-General of the United Nations, 1972, p. 196].

These great medieval mystics — all from the Catholic tradition — were men and women whom Martin Luther as well as Hammarskjöld's family friend, Archbishop Nathan Söderblom had seriously debunked. They were all men and women of a Church that had few rights within the Kingdom of Sweden, even, as we have seen, well into the 20th Century. The degree to which Söderblom found apophatic Catholic Mysticism untenable to his spiritual construct is accentuated in a passage of one of the Archbishop's later works, The Nature of Revelation:

"Christian mysticism also has felt that a personal, religious relation to Jesus Christ, as shown in the Gospels and in history, was a burden and an imperfection. 'Mysticism is a specific form of religion, namely a piety which feels that the historical in the positive religion is a burden from which it would free itself' (W. Hermann). 'The Bible is a safeguard against all mysticism which is alien toward history. Mysticism would know only of the innermost immediacy in relation to God. Feeling and imagination alone are valid as organs of the religious life. Society and history are viewed as hindrances to the religious life and must, so much as possible, be rejected in favour of the inner life' (M. Kähler). Mysticism eludes the ancient and fundamental Christian question: How can we reconcile the fact that Christianity is indisolubly joined to a phenomenon in time, namely the indispensable authority of Jesus, with the claim that Christianity is the absolute religion, exalting the religious relation above all the risks of relativity." (Söderblom, 1933, p. 78 – 80)

This passage is particularly important as many of the religious musings made by Dag Hammarskjöld in his posthumously published spiritual diary, Vägmärken, draw strongly from the apophatic tradition espoused by such mystics as the German Dominicans, Meister Eckhart, Johannes Tauler, and Henry Suso as well as the Carmelite, St. John of the Cross, and the Flemish mystic, John Ruusbroec. Thus the two Nobel Prize winners for Peace, Söderblom and Hammarskjöld, were to find themselves, in the hindsight of history, as two men of the spirit separated by a common faith.

It is therefore a misnomer to perceive Hammarskjöld as a religious conservative, in the Swedish context at least; for although Hammarskjöld was a very faithful and proud Swede in terms of cultural identity, he was very far from that, in the religious sense. If anything Hammarskjöld appears to be in light of the Church of Sweden, a religious radical, a man whose religious musings led him very close to the Catholic Church. In an interview that I conducted with the late Sven Stolpe, a Swedish Catholic author and intellectual, at his home in Filipstad in 1996; Stolpe recollected how Hammarskjöld had praised Stolpe's conversion to Catholicism when the two men met at a ceremony in the Aula at the University of Uppsala, at the time that Hammarskjöld was Secretary-General of the United Nations.

The secret life of Dag Hammarskjöld…

As one researches more and more deeply into the life of Dag Hammarskjöld, that no one knew of his writing a spiritual diary, can quite reasonably be put down to the fact, that the secret life he was leading was so divergent to the mandated uniform religious practice of his people as well as his social class. Hammarskjöld's self-depiction in Vägmärken as the 'unicorn' — that creature who cannot find a mate — could also be viewed as reflective of the isolation that he was experiencing.

His biographer, Sir Brian Urquhart points out that Hammarskjöld was totally dedicated to: "intellectual and aesthetic interests and to spiritual experience", these qualities marking him for a life of solitude [Urquhart, 1972, p. 26]. But this gives the impression that Hammarskjöld had lived the life of a eremitic — and this is far from the truth. Hammarskjöld did have a circle of friends and acquaintances, but even these individuals, it is now clear, were not permitted entry into that inner world. Even Sven Stolpe would eventually be frozen out.

Hammarskjöld's reticence to reveal his mystical musings to his closest of friends, requires of the student of the Secretary-General to suspect that there was something seriously preventing him from so doing. That serious something was probably best captured by another of Hammarskjöld's biographers, Emery Kelen (1966), who commented regarding the publication of Vägmärken, "I was astonished ... about the outcry that was being raised in Scandinavia about Hammarskjöld's religious contemplations" [Kelen, 1966, p. 107-108]. One paper as Kelen recalled stated that: "He [Hammarskjöld] identified himself increasingly with Jesus … and by 1957, Jesus turned in Hammarskjöld's diary into a politician" (Kelen, 1966, p. 108). As well as this there was across Scandinavia at this time, according to Kelen, "Widespread fears ... for Hammarskjöld's sanity" [Kelen, 1966, p. 108].

What is ironic today is the resurgence of interest in Dag Hammarskjöld within his native country; this coming at a time when the Church of Sweden to which Hammarskjöld was at least a nominal member, is at perhaps its lowest ebb in its history, in terms of public Church practice. Perhaps this is a sign that those Swedes now interested in Hammarskjöld are trying to come to terms with an inherent, ever present spiritual hunger, left unsatisfied by what they have come to know to as Church? If so, it should be a timely warning for all State Churches not to see 'Church' as being about mandating membership, or recruiting or maintaining numbers on pews, but rather about how the person who sits on the pew before the altar and pulpit can come to a Divine self-realization, through the Church.

For the current religious paradigm in Sweden is ample evidence of where sectarian laws restricting religious practice and freedom, are in the short term an insidious means by which to 'airbrush' history and curtail the human spirit. In the long-term, the restriction of religious freedom is one of the surest means by which to make a once live Church irrelevant. Ironically, as the fertile spiritual life and legacy of Dag Hammarskjöld illustrates so well, not being able to satisfy the inexhaustible breadth and depth of the human longing for God often transcends sectarian boundaries.

Dr Kania is a Research Fellow at Blackfriars Hall, the University of Oxford, where he is completing a book on Dag Hammarskjöld's Mystical Theology.

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©2009 Dr Andrew Thomas Kania

[Index of Commentaries by Dr Andrew Kania]