An Introduction to Dag Hammarskjold’s Life and Spirituality
What would it mean to practice Pauline spirituality in the modern world? This essay begins introducing the spirituality expressed in the diary of Dag Hammarskjold (1905-1961), as a possible example. Hammarskjold used diary writing as one means of deliberately cultivating in himself a cluster of virtues central to Pauline spirituality. At his death he left this diary with a friend, asking him to publish it if he thought it worthwhile. It was published in 1964 as Markings.
It is important to situate in the context of Hammarskjold’s life, a public life of extreme, extroverted engagement in world affairs, and a private life shown in his diary of extreme introverted otherworldliness.
On the “worldly” side: Hammarskjold achieved outstanding success in high-level government civil service in his native Sweden in his early thirties, subsequently represented Sweden in several areas of international relations, helped found the predecessor of the European Union, was elected as Secretary General of the United Nations in1953 at age 48, and served there until his death in a plane crash on a UN mission to the Congo in Africa in 1961 at age 56. His public reputation was mainly as a highly skilled diplomat in international affairs. He was able to connect in personal friendship and trust with many outstanding world-leaders and high-level officials from very diverse countries (e.g. China’s Chou Enlai, Egypt’s Nasser, Israel’s Ben Gurion, India’s Nehru, the Laotian King Souvanaphoma), and through behind-the-scenes delicate diplomacy convinced many leaders to make compromises toward world peace, contrary to the more belligerent forces of strident nationalism driving politics in their respective countries. In his spare time he went mountain-climbing in far-North Sweden, translated poetry and plays (in Swedish, English, and French), published some aerial photography in National Geographic magazine, entertained frequently serving gourmet cuisine in an artfully decorated Manhattan apartment, and cultivated friendship with several prominent artists and authors.
On the “otherworldly” side: Reading his diary Markings, (which he called “the only biography that can be written of me”) we enter a completely different private world of an extremely otherworldly Dag Hammarskjold.
– Extreme dedication to rightness both in his personal life and promoting rightness in the world, but no mention of any particular involvements or particular achievements in government or international affairs.
– Frequent feelings of meaninglessness almost outweighing any satisfaction in achievement. Extremely perfectionist introspective self-criticism, seeking to eliminate the least trace of self-interest in his motivations.
– An intense inner life, and a desire to find someone else to share it with — frustrated because among all his friendships he discovered no one he could share with on this level, so that his inner life remained completely private, making it sometimes a source of feelings of social disconnection and loneliness. What appears to many readers as depression and unhappiness — if not self-imposed, at least not remedied by remedies easily available to most people.
– And at the center of this private inner life was an extremely otherworldly God — otherworldly precisely because He was associated with inner, extremely private feelings that made Hammarskjold feel disconnected from the world at the deepest personal level. A God (like Paul’s God) who demands complete perfection, a wholehearted passion for rightness down to one’s inmost motives. A God who does not measure individuals by their worldly achievements, but solely by their internal motivations. A desire to be a completely selfless instrument of God and God’s rightness in the world, manifest, as Paul says, by “offering your bodies as instruments of [divine] rightness.” An extreme ideal of selflessness and self-sacrifice, combined with extreme self-confidence and immense satisfaction and self-fulfillment, connected to an extremely exalted sense of a cosmically important personal mission in the world as an instrument of God.
Some people reading Hammarskjold’s extremely introverted spiritual diary without keeping in mind his extremely active and successful public career, might get the impression of a man sometimes so depressed one wonders how he could get out of bed in the morning. Another impression some might get from the diary is that he must have been an obnoxious and self-righteous moral crusader, with a conception of a personal divine mission verging on megalomania. This again is why it is important to keep in mind his public reputation built on a very pragmatic approach to resolving international tensions, carried out with the tactfulness and interpersonal skills of a world-class diplomat. On the other side, Hammarskjold’s top level position in world politics might make him seem an unlikely model for your average person on the street. But his diary contains not one mention of his involvement in international affairs. His passion for rightness shows itself there in self-criticism concerning his everyday interactions with other individuals he came in contact with. His overwhelming concern in his diary is with purifying his own internal motives, a concern which could apply to anyone. Ultimately he judged himself by the purity of his motives, not his actual achievements.
Here are five central elements in Hammarskjold’s spirituality, which can only be understood by considering them as a whole, and understanding each element in relation to the others. (Treat Hammarskjold’s spirituality as a kind of “game,” a system of mutually defining elements, just as I treated early Buddhist spirituality as a system of mutually defining elements.)
#1-Emotional honesty. This meant paying close attention to how he did actually feel about his life at any given time, even if this meant at times facing very uncomfortable and irrational feelings of meaninglessness.
#2-Uncovering the positive side of feelings of meaninglessness, so that they could be turned into a positive drive, filling him with energizing enthusiasm for the tasks and goals he set for himself.
#3-The discovery that giving himself over to a non-rational, instinctual, emotionally enthusiastic passion for rightness — for being a selfless embodiment and representative of rightness in the world — is what would fulfill a deep yearning for a high level of meaning in his life.
#4-Constant introspective self-criticism, trying to purify his motives of those kinds of self-concern that could introduce bias into the intuitive sensitivity for rightness that he relied on as a guide to his actions.
#5-Formulating goals for action based on extremely careful attention to the unpredictable uniqueness and complexity of each situation that he faced and to the limits imposed by his own personal position and social role, and pursuing those goals in a very pragmatic and tactful way within those limits.
Due to Hammarskjold’s strong inner-driven perfectionism, he exemplifies these five elements in a rather extreme way — in a way similar to the extreme perfectionism exhibited in Plato, the Pali Canon, and the letters of Paul. Here I will take advantage of Plato’s idea of “participation” to first describe some ways in which this same spirituality could be practiced in a more moderate everyday fashion that is more accessible to ordinary understanding.
#1. First, emotional honesty regarding uncomfortable feelings that nothing very important or meaningful is going on in one’s life, feelings sometimes expressed by saying, “There must be more to life than this.” Such feelings manifest themselves in diffuse anxiety (“Angst”), listlessness, depression, lack of interest or enthusiasm for anything, waking up with a sense of having to push oneself to face more of the same kind of unsatisfying life.
There is of course no reason why a person who never feels such feelings should try to feel them. The question is rather how to understand and treat such feelings if one does actually feel them. This cannot be a matter of proving that everyone does or should feel such feelings. As feelings, they have a non-rational source, and could not be brought about by any such rational “proofs” in any case. It may be that some given person simply never feels such feelings — in which case this kind of spirituality is irrelevant to them.
It is also possible that some feelings like this are due to a chemical imbalance in the body that could be cured by drugs, or that they can be traced to some psychological problems that can be treated in therapy. We are here concerned only with a third possibility: Cases in which such feelings are a negative manifestation of a deep inner yearning for a higher level of meaning in life — a yearning that actually could be fulfilled by developing a life that a will actually be and feel much more significant and meaningful. Which of these possibilities applies in any individual case can only be decided on an individual basis.
Sometimes a person who does feel such feelings can try to protect herself against them in a number of ways.
One way is to cling to some settled lifestyle simply because, even though it doesn’t feel very meaningful or energizing, it is settled, comfortable, and predictable. (This is analogous to the Pharisaic clinging to life-under-Law, which enables a person to establish a fixed and stable moral identity in relation to a fixed and stable set of laws, even though the price of this is experiencing inner psychological conflict and reluctance.)
By contrast, we are also familiar with cases in which individuals, when circumstances permit, leave some settled lifestyle or apparently successful career in order to try to “find themselves” — i.e. to consult some deeper inner sense to discover a different way of life that would feel more deeply meaningful and fulfilling.
It is also possible to try to distract oneself from such uncomfortable feelings by losing oneself in excitement, partying, traveling, extreme sports, etc. Or it is possible to try to dull such feelings through alcohol and/or drugs.
These are the kinds of things Hammarskjold is referring to when he tells himself, “Do not anesthetize yourself” against uncomfortable feelings of emptiness and meaninglessness in life, “but gaze at the vision until you have plumbed its depths.”
#2. This assumes that negative feelings of meaninglessness stem from an inner source that potentially has a very positive content. Some part of me, below the level of conscious thought and theory, yearns for a kind and level of meaning in life, and when measured against this yearning, my present lifestyle falls far short, and so manifests itself negatively in the form of Angst, listlessness, depression, and lack of interest. But if I “gaze at” these feelings, let them develop and pay careful attention, they will reveal to me their positive content, what it is that will actually feel meaningful, important, fulfilling, and therefore awaken an energetic inner drive. As Hammarskjold says in one place, we should “keep alive that pain in the soul which drives us beyond ourselves.”
Since this is not a matter of rational thought and theorizing, what will actually fulfill any given individual’s quest for meaning is not predictable according to some general theory about this. Some individuals could find that their yearning for meaning can be fulfilled by a great love, creating great art or literature, raising a family, or communing with nature.
3. What is specific to this particular kind of spirituality, is the discovery that, for relevant individuals, an inner yearning for a more meaningful life can be fulfilled by getting in touch with and developing a deeply felt, emotional and instinctual passion for rightness, and making it part of one’s identity to represent this rightness in the world.
This would be a very different relation to moral rightness than the usual one. The more usual conception is that moral rightness consists in passive conformity to certain moral rules that are negative restrictions on a person’s freedom, for the sake of social order. An instinctual passion for rightness is more creative and active, a positive drive that often puts a person at odds with the social world in which rightness often does not prevail.
On a personal level, this passion for rightness sometimes manifests itself negatively in feelings of guilt following wrongdoing, or in the emotional need to justify oneself when one is accused of wrongdoing. In extreme cases, feelings of guilt, of having violated one’s sense of rightness, can lead to suicide. In more everyday ways, if someone accuses me of having done something wrong, I find myself involuntarily preoccupied with an inner dialogue defending myself against the accusation. I wish I could just leave the matter and get on with my work, but I can’t. This manifests a non-rational need to maintain a self-image, a “moral identity,” of a person who stands in a “right” relation to the world. While it often manifests itself in reactive “rationalization” when accused, in the more ideal case it manifests itself in an ongoing positive concern to actually do the right thing in all circumstances, to be in all one’s dealings a person of integrity.
This instinctual passion for rightness also manifests itself, for example, in anger against crooked politicians, hypocritical religious leaders, and economic oppression of the poor by the wealthy. In these cases, so far as personal spirituality is concerned, the main point is to resist the pressure to internalize the unrightness of the world, allowing the unrightness that prevails in the world to corrupt and compromise and dull my own conscience, so that I become desensitized, or actually come to participate in the unrightness itself.
#4. This instinctive and emotional concern for rightness can become an inner emotional passion linked to an increased moral sensitivity. In the most ideal case, the emotional drive then becomes its own guide, rather than trying to conform to moral guides external to itself. But it’s of course possible that one’s moral intuitions and instinctive moral reactions can be biased and so unable to be reliable moral guides in themselves. One could address this problem by falling back on conformity to external moral Law. But Hammarskjold’s spirituality pursues a different solution: Long-term efforts to purify one’s conscience and moral sensitivities, so that these can serve as reliable guides.
That is, most people have some intuitive sense of right and wrong (Socratic reasoning ultimately depends on this). But in practice, a person’s moral intuitions and instinctive moral reactions are often skewed because these reactions are influenced by other non-moral concerns, such as self-interest. For example, cutthroat competition for promotions in my company might normally arouse reactions of disgust and righteous anger, but I will be tempted to make an exception when I am one of the competitors, and in these cases find some way of justifying tactics I would find obviously objectionable in others.
So if I want to cultivate a way of being guided by an internal passion for rightness rather than external laws, self-cultivation in this case must include ongoing efforts to locate and diminish the influence of biases that might have a corrupting influence on my moral sensitivities and instinctive reactions. Self-interest is one of the more obvious corrupting influences, all the more a matter of concern because it so often operates at an unconscious or half-conscious level. I prefer not to recognize tendencies in myself that I would condemn in others, so I tend to ignore or block them out, creating a more idealized self-image of myself somewhat at odds with my real character and motivations. This is why self-cultivation in this kind of spirituality must include very active, ongoing, honest and self-critical introspection, forcing oneself to face possibly unpleasant facts about real motivations that bias one’s moral intuitions and reactions.
#5. Finally, a common failing of those guided by a internal passion for rightness is that they become narrow and simplistic in their concepts of what rightness consists in. Their passion for rightness might become narrowly focused on some particular cause (racial or sexual inequality), or some single moral principle (pro-choice or pro-life). This might cause them to ignore the complexity of particular situations, judging everything by this single standard. Their devotion to larger causes or principles might also cause them to ignore questions of rightness when it comes to everyday interactions with other individuals, feeling that “the ends justify the means,” i.e. they feel free to treat other individuals unjustly and unfairly if this furthers the single cause they are devoted to.
This is why cultivating this particular kind of spirituality requires developing contrary habits and skills. Giving one’s passion for rightness a narrow and inflexible focus makes judgments of rightness relatively safe, easy, and predictable. But in Pauline spirituality this is the equivalent of a Law-oriented morality (central to the Pharisaism that Paul opposed) that amounts to protecting oneself from the unpredictable demands of each unique situation. Countering this means cultivating the habit of attending to unpredictable complexity in situations one has to react to (think of a parent who has just given birth to a child with severe birth-defects). It also means developing the intellectual skills necessary to understand new and complex circumstances not faced before.
This also requires the habit of not only trying to right the wrongs of the world on a very large scale (which indeed could be an important part of this spirituality), but also trying to embody rightness in all of one’s “smaller” dealings with other individuals on an everyday basis, treating everyone as fairly as possible.
These five elements need to be understood in relation to each other.
– Emotional honesty facing uncomfortable feelings of a void in one’s life could be merely depressing and debilitating, unless one uses this as an occasion to search for a way of life that would positively fulfill a yearning for meaning.
– A devotion to rightness can become reluctant pushing oneself by will power to conform to external standards, unless one can get in touch with and cultivate an internal passion for rightness that can become an internal and soul-satisfying drive.
– Allowing one’s responses to be guided by moral intuitions and instinctive reactions that are their own guide can result in being unconsciously driven by self-centered biases and prejudices, unless this is accompanied by serious self-critical introspection, actively trying to become aware of such hidden biases and over time to gradually root them out.
– Such extensive self-criticism is made especially necessary and leads to positive results, only in the case of a person whose ambition is to allow her responses to be guided by moral intuitions and instinctive moral responses that are their own guide. Considered apart from this, constant introspective self-criticism can easily produce just debilitating feelings of guilt, personal failure, and unhappiness.
In their relatively moderate form, all of the above ideals are probably at least familiar to most people in the US today. It is not uncommon that people become dissatisfied with their lives for not-quite-rational reasons. Nor is it uncommon for people to find meaning in their lives by devoting themselves to some cause that they think will right some of the wrongs of the world. Many individuals have a concern for personal integrity both in relation to these larger causes and in their everyday interactions with others. Despite the common focus on moral rules (“the Ten Commandments”) when discussing moral theory, most people probably actually conduct their lives on the basis of more intuitive feelings and instinctive moral reactions that take into consideration the complexities of the many life-situations they face that do not lend themselves readily to rule-based analysis. The idea of probing deeper to understand hidden motivations underlying one’s reactions and behavior is not unknown, especially among those who have been involved in some kind of therapy.
It’s important to keep all these things in mind when reading Hammarskjold’s diary, which illustrates all of the above elements in a much more “extreme” form than most of us are familiar with. I want to advocate a Platonist approach to his spirituality.
That is, the “extreme” character of the ideals reflected in Hammarskjold’s Markings should be understood as a function of an inner-driven perfectionism. He is formulating for himself and striving to approximate in himself, these ideals in their highest, most perfect Platonic form. Those who feel put off by this perfectionist extremism should use the Platonist principle of analogy and participation to try to make sense of his thought. This principle says that the goodness of transcendent, perfect virtue-ideals is always very difficult to grasp and comprehend. We need to find starting points for understanding this goodness in examples of these same virtues that are less perfect but more familiar to us. These will be “analogous” to perfect Platonic Forms that “participate in” their goodness. Along these lines, we should understand Hammarskjold’s ideals as more extreme versions of ideals whose attractiveness we can understand when we think of them in their less extreme forms. Platonism offers a possible explanation of the extremism itself — if we could find the pure and perfect essence of any particular virtue, it would be impossible to have too much of this essence. Striving to embody this essence in its most perfect form would also amount to striving to embody it in its most extreme form. From a Platonist point of view, those who object to such perfectionist extremism need to say why this is not just a defense of lazy moral mediocrity, being satisfied with living a life much less perfect, significant, and meaningful than it could be. Moral mediocrity cannot be condemned as bad or “sinful.” It is just mediocre.
Pluralist Platonism, of course, acknowledges that there can be many other ideals that are equally perfectionist and extreme — early Buddhist Nibbana is an obvious example that is also obviously worlds apart from Hammarskjold’s ideals. Critical-pluralist Platonism also means that extreme ideals cannot be used to legitimate attitudes and behavior that is clearly not admirable. One might think of many “counterexamples” to Hammarskjold’s ideals. But the proper Platonist response to such counterexamples should not be to reject the ideals themselves (there exist counterexamples to any ideals one might think of), but “internal criticism,” refining one’s interpretation of these same ideals themselves.
Hammarskjold’s Extremism and God
We can also understand Hammarskjold’s many references to God from a Platonist point of view. Doing so would also connect God in Hammarskjold’s spirituality to his perfectionist extremism. That is,
In the present reconstruction of Platonism, the meaning of the word “divine” is the same as the meaning of the phrase “perfect in its goodness.”
As Plato says: In the divine there is no shadow of unrighteousness, only the perfection of righteousness. And nothing is more like the divine than any one of us who becomes as righteous as possible. 176c
Evils can never be done away with [in this world]… they [do not] have any place in the divine world, but they must needs haunt this region of our mortal nature. That is why we should make all speed to take flight from this world to the other, and that means becoming like the divine so far as we can, and that again is to become righteous with the help of Wisdom. (Theaetetus 176a)
This doesn’t mean that we know of the objective existence of an “other world” in which perfect rightness prevails. It means rather reinterpreting the word “divine” so that it refers to things we can rationally know to be perfect in their goodness.
The crucial practical issue for those who believe in God is the issue of where God concretely manifests Himself in human life. For example, Paul’s audiences already believed in God, but Pharisaic Jews in his audience thought that God manifests himself mainly in the form of Law. The newness of Paul’s spirituality consisted in the notion that God concretely manifests himself in the form of an internal divine Holy Spirit.
From a Platonist point of view, we should understand Paul’s “divine Holy Spirit” by means of the principle of analogy. We can find a starting point in the more familiar concept of “a passion for rightness,” exemplified for instance in figures like Mahatma Ghandhi and M.L. King. What might make an internal passion for rightness deserving of being thought of as “divine”? It deserves being thought of as divine insofar as it is perfect in its goodness. This would be the same kind of passion for rightness we are familiar with in more ordinary and accessible concrete examples, but with the imperfections removed.
Hammarskjold’s ambition is often expressed in his diary by means of the familiar religious concept of “being an instrument of God.”
But suppose we ask concretely what this means — where does he think he meets God in order to know what it would mean in concrete life to serve as God’s instrument? The answer is that he thinks God speaks to him through some kind of inner voice and passionate inner drive. He spoke in one place of wanting his whole being to be “an instrument of something which, even though it is in me, is outside and above me.”
From a Platonist point of view we should then ask, “What justifies a person in thinking of such an inner voice and passionate drive as something divine?” The Platonist answer: It deserves being considered something divine (Paul’s divine “holy spirit”) to the degree that it is perfect in its goodness. Not every inner voice and passionate drive is perfect in its goodness. What can make it perfect or near-perfect? Self-cultivation, of the kind described in the five elements explained above, practiced by Hammarskjold in a very perfectionist and extreme way.
In other words, the Platonist equation between “divine” and “perfect in its goodness” allows for a rational treatment of questions concerning the possible place of God in a person’s spirituality. Asking “Is this inner voice speaking to me the voice of God?” is simply not at all like the question I might ask, “Is the voice on the other end of the phone really my mother telling me what to do?” Despite the fact that most religious people think of God as a really existing person, hardly anyone really treats the question about the voice of God and about the voice of my mother as the same kind of question. The Platonist approach advocated here is probably not far from the actual practice of most religious people, even though most would not push this as a consistent and fully rational way that I am advocating here in the name of a reconstructed Platonism.
For many religious believers, “believing in God” necessarily entails believing that God is a being literally existing “out there,” perhaps in some unseen realm, but still with an existence external to me in the same way that trees and planets exist out there apart from me.
Is “belief in God” in this sense essential to Hammarskjold’s spirituality? The question of God’s externality actually involves several different questions that need being treated separately.
Hammarskjold puts one such question neatly when he says he wants to be an instrument of “that which, even though it is in me, is outside and above me.” That is, it is clear that he does not meet God in anything literally external to himself, such as a church organization or church leaders, or a book such as the bible. “In me” describes where he meets God. At the same time, it seems important to him to conceive of this God as “outside and above me.” But what does this mean in practice?
Concretely speaking, God is “outside” Hammarskjold in the sense that the voice of God guiding him is something beyond his rational, in-control self. Openness to God means being open both to unpredictable and uncontrollable “irrational” feelings, and also to the unpredictable “call of God” which is the same thing as “what the situation calls for,” the “call” of unpredictable life circumstances.
Hammarskjold also conceives of God as “outside and above me,” in the sense that he very often contrasts “doing God’s work,” “being an instrument of God,” with “working for myself,” motivated by a desire to get ahead in the world or gain advantages for himself in the world. As we will see, this self-image as “instrument of God” is what allowed Hammarskjold to keep pouring enormous efforts into projects important to international peace, undiscouraged by meager results and often outright failure that would have caused others to think its not worth it.
But is it essential to Hammarskjold’s spirituality that there actually be person-like entity called God, literally existing out there somewhere?
I think we should address this question along the lines of “critical reconstruction” applied throughout other essays. That is, the key question is not what Hammarskjold believed or did not believe. The key question is, “What needs to be true in order to provide Hammarskjold’s spirituality with a solid foundation?”
More specifically, in Hammarskjold’s case we can ask,
Suppose Hammarskjold makes it his main life-ambition to be an instrument of God in the world.
But suppose it turns out that there is no objectively existing person-like being corresponding to Hammarskjold’s concept of God.
Should we say in this case that Hammarskjold has led a foolish and wasted life based on an illusion?
From a strictly rational Platonist point of view, the answer is clearly no. The true measure of a person’s life is the extent to which that they have managed to exemplify genuine goodness in their character and their life. Something divine has entered and guided their life insofar as their life has been inspired by something as perfectly good as they can imagine.
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