Fearless Defender of Truth

by Anne Barbeau Gardiner

In Sigrid Undset's Quest for Truth, Father Jaki reveals how bold and hard-hitting Sigrid Undset (1882-1949) was in defense of the Church: "She held that only the living voice of the Catholic Church, speaking on behalf of Christ, can provide the norms of selflessness that among other things would safeguard monogamous marriage." She also defended the dignity of each human life, as when she called on her readers "to believe that every child has a soul which is worth more than the entire visible world." In these times Undset needs to be widely read.

Drawing from a plethora of sources, Father Jaki maps out the quest that led her into the Catholic Church on All Saints' Day 1924, just four years before she received the Nobel Prize for Literature. She converted at a time when native Norwegian priests could be counted on one hand. Undset would later recall that her conversion blessed her with the kind of "peace that governs the great depth of the sea. Good and bad weather on the surface do not affect it." While Father Jaki maps her journey into the Church in the first part of this book, in the second part he shows the extent to which biographers and critics have neglected, misrepresented or misunderstood the Catholic aspect of her life and work: her novels set in a medieval Catholic milieu have been "humanized," her essays on Catholicism sidelined, and her modern conversion novels scorned.

At a young age, Sigrid Undset cohabited and then entered into a civil marriage with a painter named Svarstad, who had abandoned his first wife and three children. She bore him three children and in 1916 took his first three children home from the orphanage to raise them with her own. By 1919 she and Svarstad were separated. Contrary to what some have written, Father Jaki notes, there was no annulment in 1924 because there was no marriage in the eyes of the Church.

While writing Kristin Lavransdatter and Olav Audunsson, novels set in medieval times, Undset began to reflect seriously on Catholic teachings about sin, confession and atonement. And so when she received a letter in 1923 from a Swedish admirer named Helena Nyblom, a convert to Catholicism, she began a correspondence that would trigger the final part of her quest — the catechetical instruction received from Father Karl Kjelstrup (1874-1946), himself a convert. That this correspondence has been overlooked explains the "shocking inadequacy" Father Jaki finds in some accounts of Undset's conversion.

In the chapter "Fearless Defender of Truth," we see how Undset stood up for the Church not long after her conversion. When a minister of the State Church lauded Luther in a newspaper article in 1927, she replied in the same newspaper that Luther was to blame for (among other things) his contemptuous view of women as "useful only to satisfy men's lust." She also compared him unfavorably with Thomas More, whom she greatly admired, and summed up the Reformation as the revolt of men trying to recast Christianity in the mold of their own subjective ideas.

Also in 1927 she published replies to two Lutheran bishops. The first was to the bishop of Trondheim, who had dismissed her conversion as romantic infatuation with the Middle Ages. In her answer she made this astute comparison between a Protestant and a Catholic convert: the first believes he is already "saved," while the second has a "feeling of repentance" and hopes to persevere, but knows he must correspond with grace right to the end. She was not blinded by ideologies grounded on the perfectibility of man, but saw clearly that original sin is "a kind of innate eye disease of the soul." It was her wise conviction that "There is nothing in the experience of man which shows that the raw material of human nature has ever changed."

Her second reply was to Archbishop Soderblom, who had complained that Rome did not respond to his call for ecumenism. Undset laid out the reasons why Protestantism and Catholicism could not reach a common understanding, and among these she mentioned the difference of worship: "For Protestants, the service is above all a meeting of the faithful for periodic fellowship, Sunday after Sunday; for Catholics, in the deepest sense, the service means the holy Mass, the unbloody repetition of the offering on the cross at Golgotha." She also pointed out that the foundation of the State Church was crumbling before the juggernaut of sexual immorality.

Also in the late 1920s, Undset continued to propagate her faith by publishing translations of Robert Hugh Benson's Christ and the Church (1910) and Christ's Friendship (1912). In the first book, Benson explains that the Church's infallibility in doctrine is derived from her close union with Jesus Christ, while in the second, he writes of a friendship with our divine Savior that leads to sainthood. Around the same time, Undset conceived a two-part novel, The Wild Orchid and The Burning Bush (1928), about a young man who experiences such a friendship with our Lord and finds, as a result, new "depths" opening up in the "inmost parts of his being." This divine friendship then keeps him faithful to an unhappy marriage. In 1928 Undset also published "Reply to a Parish Priest," in which she stated that lifelong monogamy was not possible to advocate "unless one believes that every single human soul is worth God's dying to save it." She also declared that the last two millennia of Western civilization were not "the fruit of natural human development, but a result of men having accepted God's revelation in Jesus Christ and worked under the grace of his Holy Spirit." Evidently, like Hilaire Belloc, she saw the faith as the groundwork of European civilization.

In the chapter "Saints as Truth's Embodiments," Father Jaki shows how saints were of colossal importance for Undset from as far back as 1912, when she was in London and bought Alban Butler's twelve-volume Lives of Saints. In 1934 she published Saga of Saints, about Norwegian saints of the Middle Ages, in which the longest chapter was on St. Olav, the king who brought Norway into Christendom in the early eleventh century, while the last chapter was on the as yet un-canonized Karl Schilling (1835-1907). In 1935, in "My Reasons to Convert," Undset exclaimed about the communion of saints, "No human solidarity is as absolute as the solidarity between the living cells in the mystical body of Christ."

Father Jaki notes that Undset was one of the few who from the early 1930s "saw the dire threat of Nazi racism and eugenics." As a result, the Nazis vilified her works in the late 1930s, and when they overran Norway in 1940, Undset had to escape to America. From that distance she contemplated Europe and declared that it was uncertain whether Europe would survive, but if it did, it would have to become a new and religious Europe in which Catholicism would be a force. In 1945, on her return home, Undset composed her last work, a biography of St. Catherine of Siena, which Father Jaki rates very high among her achievements.

Undset had become a Dominican tertiary after her conversion, taking the name Olave (after King St. Olav). As such, she used to say the Rosary each day and recite the Little Office of the Virgin Mary. Her generosity was astonishing, for (among other benefactions) she gave virtually all of her Nobel Prize money to charity.

The second part of Sigrid Undset's Quest for Truth recounts how many biographers and critics have ignored, minimized or shown hostility toward Undset's Catholicism. Father Jaki gives detailed accounts of these writings, demonstrating how an "abiding antipathy for Sigrid Undset the Catholic" casts a shadow today over her genius and her monumental achievements. The antipathy arose because of Undset's steadfast loyalty to the Catholic Church as the conveyor of reality in all its heights and depths, including the supernatural.

Father Jaki designates as her "foremost intellectual biographer" Borghild Krane, whose Sigrid Undset: Liv og meninger [Life and Opinions] came out in 1970. Krane regards Undset's essays, especially those on the saints, as the best places to become acquainted with her. Once, when Krane asked the author about the reason for her conversion, Undset told her that she had become "convinced that what the Catholic Church taught was objective truth." Krane rightly scoffs at the idea that this no-nonsense woman would have been a romantic dreamer drawn to the Middle Ages. Unfortunately, Krane's work has not yet been translated into English.

The 1953 biography by Andreas Hofgaard Winsnes has been translated and has become "authoritative," but it contains factual errors and fails to do justice to Undset's "Catholic realism " A Protestant, Winsnes wrongly identifies Undset as a Thomist and fails to grasp the importance of several of her Catholic writings. Among the other critics Father Jaki discusses we find Finn Anders Thorn, a Catholic priest of the "new" ecumenical sort, who in a book on Undset tries to undercut the seriousness of her conversion, and Marlene Ciklamini, who writes about Undset as having been "obsessed" with Catholicism after her conversion. Then there is Mitzi Mallarian Brunsdale, who goes so far as to speak of Jesus Christ as the supreme "Myth" to which Undset submitted. Father Jaki retorts that for Sigrid Undset, our Lord was "infinitely more than a myth." Brunsdale's lack of sympathy for Undset's faith is plain to see in these lines: "Much of Undset's contemporary literary fame has slipped away by now, just as many restrictive Roman Catholic positions have melted away in the aftermath of the Second Vatican Council."

In two appendices, Father Jaki presents the long "Postscript" to Undset's From Women's Viewpoint (1919) and the brief essay, "My Reasons to Convert" (1935). Both are translated here for the first time. In the "Postscript," written five years before her conversion, Undset already defends traditional marriage, priestly celibacy and the veneration of saints, besides extolling the Church's view of the Virgin Mary as giving woman "the most honorable place she has ever been placed in." In giving an account of her conversion, Undset observes that the Church alone has claimed to be the living guide that wields the authority handed down by our Lord Jesus Christ.

It is troubling to see all the evidence Father Jaki assembles in these pages showing how critics have not sufficiently respected Sigrid Undset's abiding love for the Catholic Church. Undset saw clearly that the problems of modern life are "essentially religious," which is why secularized critics find her hard to swallow. She would have understood their dilemma, for in one of the many striking passages in her "Postscript," she declares: "One cannot accuse Christianity of being unaware of the fact that human wickedness and stupidity are bottomless " Then she adds in the same breath that Christianity also presupposes "a bottomless depth of goodness and wisdom, from which mankind can draw more than they suspect."

One hopes that this book will inspire many of those teaching in Catholic colleges to include the works of this great daughter of the Church in their syllabi.

Anne Barbeau Gardiner
Brewater, N.Y.

© Ignatius Press

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