Excerpts and Comments on Hammarskjold’s Markings
Shortly after he became Secretary General of the UN in 1953, Hammarskjold gave a radio interview to Edward R. Murrow, one of the few occasions in which he spoke publicly about his religious faith and spirituality. This interview is given in full in an appendix . Here, by way of introduction to Hammarskjold’s diary, I want to quote and comment on a few significant passages from what he said at this interview.
One big difficulty for many people today in understanding Christianity is that the language of the Christian religion — terms like God, Sin, Salvation that form the “objective content” of Christian teaching — have little or no connection to their own personal experience. This makes them feel Christian teachings as something imposed on them from outside. “Faith” in these teachings is an externally imposed obligation that requires a person to set aside her own personal experiences and what she might learn from her experiences, and substitute for these a set of supernatural truths, belief in which is a membership requirement for belonging to a church.
Hammarskjold has a different view of the relation between “the language of religion” (its “objective content”) and “a basic spiritual experience” (the “subjective” side of Christian spirituality. He said in the interview:
“The language of religion is a set of formulas which register a basic spiritual experience.”
This points out one important aspect of Hammarskjold’s diary for present purposes. That is, it shows a person not starting from the objective content of Christian teaching, feeling an obligation to make his life or subjective inner attitudes conform to this. He starts, rather, from the other “subjective” end. Deep reflection on certain very personal and private inner experiences, leads him to realize that certain aspects of traditional Christian thought serve very well to articulate these experiences. This gives modern individuals who can at least vicariously identify with Hammarskjold’s feelings some understanding of a possible connection between subjective experiences and the objective content of Christian teaching.
As he says: “A never abandoned effort frankly and squarely to build up a personal belief in the light of experience and honest thinking has led me in a circle; I now recognize and endorse, unreservedly, those very beliefs which were once handed down to me.”
He does recognize that part of the reason he feels this affinity for Christian language is that his inner life was greatly shaped by a his upbringing:
“The beliefs in which I was once brought up and which, in fact, had given my life direction even while my intellect still challenged their validity, were recognized by me as mine in their own right and by my free choice.”
Hammarskjold’s father came from a long line of high-level non-political civil servants in Sweden, with high standards of selfless and principled, but non-ideological devotion to public service. His mother was a very religious Lutheran who would take him after church on various errands to help the poor in their city; he associates his mother especially with the emotional, non-rational part of religion.
Hammarskjold was a modern individual educated in a secular state (many of his classmates were atheists), Hammarskjold could hardly escape intellectual challenges to the literal truth of the objective content of Christian supernatural beliefs. His resolution of this problem consisted largely in de-emphasizing the objective content of Christian belief, emphasizing instead the subjective/emotional feelings. He says, “faith is a state of mind and soul… not describing… a reality… which we can analyze with the tools of logic.”
“Faith is a state of the mind and the soul. In this sense we can understand the words of the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross: ‘Faith is the union of God with the soul.’ The language of religion is a set of formulas which register a basic spiritual experience. It must not be regarded as describing, in terms to be defined by philosophy, the reality which is accessible to our senses and which we can analyze with the tools of logic.”
Elsewhere (p. 11) Hammarskjold speaks disparagingly of “empty talk about faith as something to be rationally comprehended, something ‘true’.”
Excerpts and Comments on Markings.
In the following I present quotes from Hammarskjold’s diary in plain text, my comments in italics.
Here is very the first diary entry, belonging to a period between 1925 and 1930, ages 20-25 for Hammarskjold (born in 1905):
I am bring driven forward
Into an unknown land.
the pass grows steeper,
The air colder and sharper.
A wind from my unknown goal
Stirs the strings
Of expectation.
Still the question:
Shall I ever get there?
There were life resounds,
A clear pure note
In the silence. (p. 1)
This sense of being driven from within is a constant theme throughout his diary. The drive is not attached to any particular life-goal that can be known ahead of time. His “destination” is not any particular achievement, but an inner state of mind, described in the image of “Life” living through him and sounding a single “clear pure note” separate from a “noisy” world. Note the metaphors from mountain-climbing, his favorite sport.
What you have to attempt — to be yourself. What you have to pray for — to become a mirror in which, according to the degree of purity of heart you have attained, the greatness of Life will be reflected.(4)
There is a repeated sense throughout his diary of being a vehicle or instrument for something greater, here called “Life.” But this is not like setting aside one’s own interests to serve the interests of another. “being a mirror in which the greatness of Life is reflected” is the same thing as “being yourself.”
One thing to notice throughout the following quotes is the way Hammarskjold’s spirituality involves combinations of things that we usually think of as opposed to each other. This seems characteristic of all ideals that strive to go beyond familiar, relatively mediocre ideals of goodness, and strive for some more perfect way of being. This is connected with Plato’s Ladder — things that are easy to understand (at the bottom) are imperfect. Things that are perfect (at the top of the ladder) are hard to understand — because they require formulating concepts that contain seeming opposites if one thinks in more familiar categories.
If your goal is not determined by your most secret pathos, even victory will only make you painfully aware of your own weakness.(4)
“Your most secret pathos” is what you are able to personally feel as most important and meaningful in life, in your most private self. Achieving goals that are determined by anything else (like society’s ideas of what should feel as important), are going to leave you feeling empty even when successful. His spirituality is connected to those feelings which are most private, least connected to “the general public.”
The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.
Listening to an inner voice is not opposed to, but connected with, attending to each situation and what it calls for.
A task becomes a duty from the moment you suspect it to be an essential part of that integrity which alone entitles a man to assume responsibility.
Duty is not a matter of conformity to set rules, but by concern for responding with integrity to tasks set for him by each situation.
Life only demands from you the strength you possess. Only one feat is possible — not to have run away.(4)
He doesn’t feel he is taking initiative in trying to achieve something great, but only “not running away” from the challenges presented to him by tasks set for him by situations he faces.
He broke fresh ground — because, and only because, he had the courage to go ahead without asking whether others were following or even understood…. he had been granted a faith which required no confirmation — a contact with reality, light and intense like the touch of a loved hand: a union in self-surrender without self-destruction, where his heart was lucid and his mind loving. In sun and wind, how near and how remote -. How different from what the knowing ones call Mysticism.
Here is a new kind of entry, in which he tries to directly describe an intense but subtle inner experience. He feels some inner contact with a “reality” he feels within, in a space where his heart is lucid and his mind loving. But he thinks this is different from ordinary concepts of “mysticism” — perhaps because he doesn’t value this as a “religious experience” valued for its own sake. It gives him self-confidence and courage to “break fresh ground” in public affairs, consulting others but ultimately not needing their approval.
Now. When I have overcome my fears — of others, of myself, of the underlying darkness: at the frontier of the unheard-of. Here ends the known. But from a source beyond it, something fills my being with its possibilities. Here desire is purified and made lucid: each action is a preparation for, each choice a yes to the unknown. Prevented by the duties of life on the surface from looking down into the depths, yet all the while being slowly trained and molded by them to take the plunge into the deep whence rises the fragrance of a forest star, bearing the promise of a new affinity. At the frontier — (p. 76)
What guides him is beyond rational thought or clear comprehension, beyond where “the known” ends. Active involvements in political affairs prevent him from paying more attention to this, but at the same time also prepare and mold him to be more in touch with it. Note “fear… of the underlying darkness.” As we will see further below, he seems always aware of some dark “void” within him threatening to deprive his life of meaning, a darkness beyond rational comprehension or rational control. In another passage (quoted below), he pictures this dark void as something he must face squarely, as “the reality before which we must justify our existence.” Here he shows the positive side of this, if fear of this darkness can be overcome, it opens up a space where “desire is purified and made lucid” and he feels “the fragrance of a forest star.”
Another image for this: a morning star, a “Real Thing” — living in accord with it makes him “real.”
Low down in cool space
One star —
The morning star.
In the pale light of sparseness
Lives the Real Thing
And we are real (p. 72)
During a working day, which is real only in God, the only poetry which can be real to you is the kind which makes you become real under God ; only then is the poetry real for you, the art true. You no longer have time for pastimes.
The particular inner experiences described by means of many images in passages quoted above, can also be described using traditional Christian language about God. His inner drive and “most secret pathos” is what connects him to God, and ultimately it is keeping this inner connection alive — not any actual external achievements — which makes him “most real.” This kept him going, putting immense effort into projects like trying to make peace between Arabs and Israelis when he realized that progress in this endeavor was “possible but not probable.”
Now you know. When the worries over your work loosen their grip, then this experience of light, warmth, and power. From without — a sustaining element, like air to the glider or water to the swimmer. An intellectual hesitation which demands proofs and logical demonstration prevents me from ‘believing’ — in this, too. Prevents me from constructing it in terms of knowledge as an interpretation of reality. Yet through me there flashes this vision of a magnetic field in the soul… (p. 84)
An inner feeling of “light, warmth, and power.” Intellectual hesitations prevent him from believing that this is due to an actual entity (“God”), but this just means that what he feels is “beyond the frontiers of the known.” It doesn’t diminish the experience itself. (Compare Paul’s sense that “Spirit” is beyond ordinary human understanding.)
God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all wonder.(46)
The opening line here is perhaps a reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s (1844-1900) statement about the modern world, “God is dead” (so far as modern people are concerned). In another place Hammarskjold says: “To ‘believe in God’ is to believe in yourself, as self-evident, as ‘illogical’, and as impossible to explain: if I can be, then God is.”
I don’t know Who — or what — put the question, I don’t know when it was put. I don’t even remember answering. But at some moment I did answer Yes to Someone — or something — and from that hour I was certain that existence is meaningful and that, therefore, my life, in self-surrender, had a goal. (p. 205)
Earlier at one point, in a “mid-life crisis” at age 47, he had reported feeling that: “What I ask for is absurd, that my life should have a meaning.” The emotional honesty shown in directly facing feelings of meaningless are a condition for eventually finding what will actually fulfill “man’s quest for meaning.” It means that the “certainty that existence is meaningful” is not just an intellectual belief, but knowing-by-perceiving that a yearning has been fulfilled — a perception that the voice within him (his “most secret pathos”) yearning for a meaning-filled life had actually been satisfied.
“Treat others as ends, never as means.” And myself as an end only in my capacity as a means: to shift the dividing line in my being between subject and object to a position where the subject, even if it is in me, is outside and above me — so that my whole being may become an instrument for that which is greater than I.(46)
The opening quotation here is from the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) who posed it as a basic moral principle in ethics. Hammarskjold uses it to make a completely different point. His spiritual ambition is that his ordinary “I” (as “subject”) not be an agent pursuing its own ends, but that this “I” be a selfless instrument for another “subject” within him that is “greater than I.” That which is greater than I” is not something literally external to his being, but something that makes itself felt “in me,” even though in another sense it is “outside and above me.”
Note that this is also a good way of describing Paul’s idea of God’s Holy Spirit, which is also something that manifests itself “in” a person, but is at the same time felt and imagined as “outside and above” the person.
The kinds of inner experiences expressed in the diary entries above will perhaps be unfamiliar to many readers. It is hard to say how common they are, because — just as in Hammarskjold’s case, they tend to be very private, something people tend not to talk about.
It may be, on the other hand, that many people have some inner experiences that could possibly develop into the kinds of experiences reflected in Hammarskjold’s diary, but that developing them in a positive way requires certain kinds of self-cultivation. For example, many people probably at times feel the presence of some “underlying darkness” within themselves, but feel this only as something negative and frightening to rid oneself of, having no idea that this fearful darkness has the potential of turning into something very positive, a positive drive leading to a meaning-filled life. This positive potential can only be realized by sustained introspective self-cultivation of the general kind we find reflected in Markings. Some people probably feel something “greater” within them, but do not connect this to language about God, since they associate God with church tradition, institutions, and authorities which are more literally “outside” them with hardly any connection to their inner personal experiences.
In its original context in the first Christian generation, the inner transformation envisioned in Pauline spirituality was brought about in emotional response to Pauline preaching. This is the side of Christian tradition that modern Pentecostal and Evangelical Christians try to keep alive. Hammarskjold does not belong to this tradition, but has more affinities with monastic Christianity, developed by medieval Christian monks and nuns who formulated certain inner ideals (particular “virtues”) which they then deliberately tried to cultivate in themselves through long-term self-cultivation. In his radio interview, Hammarskjold describes what this tradition meant to him when he says:
The explanation of how man should live a life of active social service in full harmony with himself as a member of the community of the spirit, I found in the writings of those great medieval mystics for whom ‘self-surrender’ had been the way to self-realization, and who in ‘singleness of mind’ and ‘inwardness’ had found strength to say yes to every demand which the needs of their neighbors made them face, and to say yes also to every fate life had in store for them when they followed the call of duty, as they understood it.
Entries in his diary show that the “medieval mystics” whose writings probably influenced him most were Thomas a Kempis (1380-1471), Meister Eckhart (1260-1328), and John of the Cross (Juan de la Cruz 1542-1591). Thomas a Kempis’s Imitation of Christ was found on a table by his bedside on the day he died in a plane-crash.
It is this tradition of deliberate self-cultivation that we need to keep in mind when reading Hammarskjold’s diary. Self-cultivation in this mode is intensely introspective, paying regular attention to internal emotional states, feelings, motivations, and so on, considering them all in relation to particular internal ideals a person wants to cultivate in herself over the long run.
The quotes from Markings above reflect some positive aspects of Hammarskjold’s inner life. But monastic self-cultivation and spirituality also involves several elements that might at first seem merely negative and even “unhealthy,” especially to those familiar with modern psychology and psychotherapy, with its emphasis on “virtues” such as being socially well-adjusted, on overcoming inner conflicts, on self-acceptance, and on learning to be content and happy with oneself and one’s life. There is much to be said for these ideals, but to understand Hammarskjold’s (and Paul’s) spirituality, we need to avoid “external criticism,” judging Hammarskjold in the light of a set of virtues completely different from those given priority in this spirituality.
There are two elements to Hammarskjold’s kind of self-cultivation that are likely to appear merely negative, especially when viewed in isolation, not realizing their importance as a means of developing an inner life characterized by certain particular virtues and by the more positive kinds of experiences reflected in the passages quoted above. They are all the more likely to appear negative because they exhibit themselves in such an extreme way in his diary.
(1) One essential element in this self-cultivation is emotional honesty in facing personal “irrational” feelings of meaninglessness that might lurk beneath the surface in the middle of a life that might appear very successful from a more rational point of view. Apparently Hammarskjold frequently experienced such feelings in a strong way, and so his inner life appears extreme in this respect.
Of course there is no point in trying to have such feelings, but the habit of honest and deep introspection allowing oneself to feel such feelings when they do occur is important for insuring that one’s life-goals are “determined by one’s most secret pathos,” “keeping alive that pain in the soul that drives us beyond ourselves.” Negative feelings are the manifestations of something that can be positive. Something in a person is yearning for a higher level of meaning than her present life provides, causing feelings of meaninglessness — lacking in the meaning that this inner drive yearns for. But if a person listens and by testing finds a way of living life that will fulfill this yearning, the yearning can itself become a positive, energizing drive, a “pain in the soul that drives us beyond ourselves.” A person who gives top priority to inner peace, or to being happy and content, will not value any such “pain in the soul.” One of Hammarskjold’s teachers described him as “wound tight” — not a person who wanted to just be content in life, but a person who valued most highly an inner energizing drive that always “pushes him beyond himself”
(In fact, Hammarskjold’s biographers have emphasized how unusually energetic Hammarskjold was. In a crisis, he could work for several days on end with only a few hours sleep. One of his colleagues working in Paris on European economic integration said “Hammarskjold expected us all to go out together to some highbrow play in the evening, and afterwards come back and work until two in the morning.” His government bodyguards in Egypt complained that they could not keep up with him on his sightseeing walks through Cairo.)
Unless we keep in mind the positive part that keeping in touch with negative feelings of meaninglessness play in Hammarskjold’s spirituality, he can appear merely a very person paralyzed by feelings of meaninglessness, with an unhealthy fixation on these feelings.
(2) A second essential element that appears extreme in Hammarskjold’s diary is extreme and seemingly constant self-criticism. He seems to be constantly blaming himself for what most people would regard as very normal human self-concern, like normal concern to be recognized for one’s achievements. “How… can you attach a shadow of importance to the question whether or not the memory of your efforts will be associated with your name? If you do, is it not all too obvious that you are still being influenced in your actions by that vain dead dream about ‘posterity’? (1956)
Intense and constant self-criticism plays two roles in Hammarskjold’s self-cultivation:
(a) His particular way of fulfilling his quest for meaning was to fashion an identity as a selfless instrument of rightness in the world. Pursuing his own self-interest was one of the main obstacles to be overcome in order to fashion and maintain this identity. When he does feel a void in his life, his reaction is almost always to attribute this empty feeling to some self-interested concern, usually concern for recognition from others. “Isn’t the void which surrounds you when the noise ceases, your just reward for a day spent preventing others from neglecting you.”
(b) Self-interest is also the greatest potential source of bias and distortion in one’s moral intuitions or “conscience.” A person like Hammarskjold whose spiritual ambition is to be guided only by an inner voice and an inner instinctive drive toward rightness, rather than any particular rules or social norms, must also take great care to detect and weed out elements of self-interest lurking below the level of normal conscious awareness that might corrupt his intuitive sense of rightness. In Platonist terms: A person who “divinizes” his own conscience, regarding it as the voice of God, must take care to purify this conscience so that it will be deserving of this status as ultimate moral authority.
Here are a few excerpts illustrating this emotional honesty and intensely critical self-analysis.
Isn’t the void which surrounds you when the noise ceases, your just reward for a day spent preventing others from neglecting you.
We carry our nemesis within us: yesterday’s self-admiration is the legitimate father of to-day’s feeling of guilt.(4)
“Guilt” in Hammarskjold is never guilt at obvious lapses in moral decency, but a general feeling of falling short, something lacking in his life. When he feels this, he almost always looks for a cause in some failing against his own high and extreme standards of selflessness.
He seeks his own comfort –and is rewarded with glimpses of satisfaction followed by a long period of emptiness and shame which sucks him dry.
He fights for position — all his talk about “the necessary preconditions for doing something worthwhile” prove an insecure barrier against self-disgust.
He devotes himself to his job — but he is in doubt as to its importance and, therefore, constantly looking for recognition.(27)
Hammarskjold is always probing into his own “subconscious” motivations hidden behind rationalizations. For example, he tells himself that he must “fight for position” in the political arena in order to have the opportunity to do good for the world, but he suspects that this is a rationalization covering up his real motive — he needs status in the world to cover over feelings of self-disgust. The underlying motive for his need for recognition is that somewhere inside he is not really confident that the goals he sets himself are of real importance. This deep introspective probing always takes the form of self-criticism, becoming aware of morally disreputable motives in order to weed them out and prevent them from corrupting his moral instincts, and to spur him on to resolve these internal problems in a different way, by setting goals that he can really feel as important (“determined by his most secret pathos”), and by becoming a selfless instrument in service to these goals.
Never let success hide its emptiness from you, achievement its nothingness, toil its desolation. And so keep alive the incentive to push on further, that pain in the soul which drives us beyond ourselves.
Whither? That I don’t know. That I don’t ask to know.(45)
This is not a theory that all success is empty and all achievement is nothing. But at their best these concrete results are only the more tangible results (Platonist “appearances”) of an inner drive wherein lies the substantive goodness manifest in them. Some ache within him drove him to put out the effort needed to achieve these successes. Allowing contentment in these successes to assuage the ache will lessen the ache and the drive connected to it, so he feels he must keep alive the ache in order to keep alive the drive. But as his very first diary entry stated “I am being driven… toward and unknown goal.” It is important to him that this drive be its own guide, so he cannot determine set goals for himself ahead of time, being assured that he knows ahead of time where this drive will lead him.
Uneasy, uneasy, uneasy –
Why ?
Because – when opportunity gives you the obligation to create, you are content to meet the demands of the moment, from one day to the next.
Because – anxious for the good opinion of others, and jealous of the possibility that they may become ‘famous’, you have lowered yourself to wondering what will happen in the end to what you have done and been.
How dead can a man be behind a facade of great ability, loyalty – and ambition! Bless your uneasiness as a sign that there is still life in you.
When all becomes silent around you, and you recoil in terror — see that your work has become a flight from suffering and responsibility, your unselfishness a thinly disguised masochism; hear, throbbing within you, the spiteful, cruel heart of the steppe wolf — do not then anesthetize yourself by once again calling up the shouts and horns of the hunt, but gaze steadfastly at the vision until you have plumbed its depths. (10)
This is one of many entries that speak of “terrifying” feelings of emptiness and meaninglessness in his life that he apparently often feels when he is alone at the end of a workday. And again he reacts by looking to hidden moral weaknesses as the source of this terror he feels. He also warns himself against “anesthetizing” himself, covering over this feeling of emptiness by calling to mind exciting things (perhaps exciting political battles?). He has to look more deeply into the feelings, until he has understood where they come from, and ultimately realize their positive potential. “wrestle with your feelings until you can put them in intellectual form, then act accordingly”
The next entry reflects this same “terrifying” experience of meaninglessness “when we are compelled to look ourselves in the face,” but relates this experience to the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition of the “terrifying” presence of God.
On the bookshelf of life, God is a useful work of reference, always at hand but seldom consulted. In the whitewashed hour of birth, He is a jubilation and a refreshing wind, too immediate for memory to catch. But when we are compelled to look ourselves in the face — then He rises above us in terrifying reality, beyond all argument and “feeling”, stronger than all self-defensive forgetfulness. (10)
So, once again, you chose for yourself — and opened the door to chaos. The chaos you become whenever God’s hand does not rest upon your head.
He who has once been under God’s hand, has lost his innocence: only he feels the full explosive force of destruction which is released by a moment’s surrender to temptation.
But when his attention is directed beyond and above, how strong he is, with the strength of God who is within him because he is in God. Strong and free, because his self no longer exists. (87)
Hammarskjold has had some exhilarating experiences of “being under God’s hand” — on those occasions when he feels he has been able to be a selfless instrument for “that which, even if it is in me, is outside and above me.” In these experiences he feels “strong and free with the strength of God who is within him.” At other times he loses this feeling of inner strength and unity, and his inner life comes to feel chaotic. This sense of inner chaos is greatly exacerbated because of its felt contrast with the former state of “divine” inner unity and strength. These experiences of being under the hand of God strengthen Hammarskjold’s inner driven perfectionism, because they establish such a high benchmark against which all other states of being are measured in his feelings. “Only he feels the full force of destruction” and chaos in his emotional life when he falls short of this ideal of being a perfectly selfless instrument, and “chooses for himself.”
The next excerpt needs some extended introduction and comment. It begins with a short poem about diary-writing itself, “wretched attempts to make an [inner] experience apprehensible” which he elsewhere described as “wrestl[ing] with your problem until its emotional discomfort is clearly conceived in an intellectual form.”
Typically, the inner experience referred to here is of a kind of “darkness” that seems beyond rational comprehension, described elsewhere as “the underlying darkness: at the frontier of the unheard-of. Here ends the known. But from a source beyond it, something fills my being with its possibilities.” A “still” “silent” “dark” space in his mind striving to liberate itself through some kind of verbal expression if he could only understand it and put it into words. This is what he tries to do in his diary entries.
Echoing silence.
Darkness lit up by beams.
Light
Seeking its counterpart
In melody.
Stillness
Striving for liberation
In a word.
Life
In dust
In shadow
How seldom growth and blossom
How seldom fruit.
Then he comments on this opening poem:
These wretched attempts to make an experience apprehensible (for my sake? for others?) — the tasks of the morrow — Y’s friendship or X’s appreciation of what I have done: paper screens which I place between myself and the void to prevent my gaze from losing itself in the infinity of time and space.
The words in his diary are an attempt to “liberate” his deepest and most private feelings (the “secret pathos” “beyond the frontier of the known”) by putting them into words. But the temptation is to then hold onto the words as a kind of protection (“paper screens”) against this internal, seemingly dark and contentless, sometimes terrifying “void.” He likens this internal void to “the infinity of time and space,” gazing into which can bring on a kind of vertigo.
Later in the passage he refers to the “infinite spaces” using the French phrase “les espaces infinis,” a quote from the book Pensees written by the Christian scientist and philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) who said “Le silence eternel des espaces infinis m’efraye” “The eternal silence of the infinite spaces terrifies me.”
The paper screens are not very good protection however:
Small paper screens. Blown to shreds by the first puff of wind, catching fire from the tiniest spark. Lovingly looked after — but frequently changed.
This protection-in-words proves flimsy protection, as shown in the fact that something in him is never satisfied with what he has previously written, or goals he has previously set himself. The dark void within him is still dissatisfied and “blows to shreds” his previous attempts at verbalization. It is is never adequately described in any particular set of words, but continually cries out for new expression, so the paper screens need to be “frequently changed” by new diary entries. (Anyone who has kept a diary can probably recognize the experience recorded here: Reading this year some exciting ideas I recorded in the diary last year, I wonder now what ever excited me about them.)
He concludes that, although verbalizations in his diary are useful, they can prove no substitute for directly facing the endless void that can never be captured in a fixed way in any set of words. He has to accept this dark void as “the reality before which he must justify his existence.”
This dizziness in the face of les espaces infinis — only overcome if we dare to gaze into them without any protection. And accept them as the reality before which we must justify our existence.(40-41)
Hammarskjold’s ultimate responsibility is not to anything that can be pinned down in a fixed way in words, rules, or goals. It is to some voice within him which cannot be captured by means of anything fixed and definite. It is like a “void,” the inner equivalent of the infinite spaces of the external universe, which however is not really vague and contentless. It is a very demanding void which can be terrifying. But as explained earlier this void that can manifest itself in a negative and terrifying way, can also become a positive drive giving one’s life a sense of exhilarating purpose. It is like a “pain in the soul” that drives a person to achieve high ambitions. At any given moment in life, responding to specific circumstances, this inner drive gives specific direction, setting specific tasks (in international diplomacy) to which Hammarskjold devotes himself with all his energy. It’s just that the content of this drive cannot be fixed in any kind of permanent way, eliminating the necessity of paying constant attention to the dark and incomprehensible terrifying void itself.
Hammarskjold and Paul: Some Analogies
This last passage provides an opportunity to introduce some specific themes of Pauline preaching, beginning to explain how Hammarskjold’s spirituality provides us with a modern analogy to the spirituality of Paul. Hammarskjold’s thought generalizes certain elements of Pauline psychology in a way that makes it more accessible to those who have difficulty relating Paul’s specific language and categories to their own internal life.
In this analogy:
Hammarskjold’s criticism of his attempt to pin down the content of his inner drive in words are analogous to Paul’s criticism of the attempt in Pharisaic Judaism to pin down the demands of God in a fixed set of laws. Defining rightness by a fixed and stable set of laws is attractive because it enables a person to establish a fixed and stable moral identity defined in relation to these laws. This law-oriented form of Judaism serves for Paul as a main reference point Paul uses to define his spirit-oriented spirituality by contrast.
Just as Hammarskjold judges everything from the point of view of someone who has “once been under God’s hand,” Paul judges everything from the perspective of a person possessed by God’s Holy Spirit. From Paul’s perspective, Pharisaic attachment to Law is the primary “sin,” because it amounts to trying to protect oneself against God’s Holy Spirit.
This is analogous to Hammarskjold’s willingness to treat his own diary entry as “paper screens” that should not be allowed to protect him from something within him which ultimately cannot be pinned down and comprehended in words, but which is the ultimate reality in the face of which he must “justify his existence.”
On the other hand, both for Paul and for Hammarskjold, this inner drive, beyond rational comprehension and control, still has specific content as a drive toward rightness. In Pauline thought, living a Spirit-possessed life is the same as “offering your bodies as instruments of [divine] Rightness.” Both Paul and Hammarskjold picture this as selfless service to something which “even though it is in me, is outside and above me” (Paul’s “Spirit of God.”) It is “outside me” in the sense that it is beyond my rational understanding and control, and also in the sense that being in service to it is contrasted with pursuing worldly self-interest. It is “above me” in the sense that it is transcendent and divine (in Plato’s sense), something that never becomes completely identical with my own imperfect being, which remains ever imperfect (because of its inevitable self-concern) while trying to live up to the ideal of being a selfless instrument of perfect rightness. The best an actual person can realistically hope for is to “participate in” this divinization-from-within.
The extreme and unusual character of Hammarskjold’s inner life can give the mistaken impression if one tries to connect his extraordinary inner life in a very direct way to some particular ways of being and behaving visible to his associates. But one of the extraordinary things about Hammarskjold is the particular way he was able to combine an intense God-centered inner life with an external social life which had so little directly evident connection to religion or spirituality that even his closest friends were taken totally by surprise at the contents of his diary published after his death.
Not that there was no connection. But the connection between his inner personal life and his outer social and political involvements was such that
(a) what his associates admired in him were virtues like integrity, high-energy, selfless devotion to rightness, diplomatic skill in dealing with a wide variety of people, persistence in trying to resolve extremely thorny international conflicts that others might regard as completely hopeless and not worth the effort, and (b) he could conceptualize and explain reasons for his initiatives in purely rational terms understandable to all irrespective of their religious beliefs, or lack of religious beliefs. That is, ultimately, determining what is “the will of God” was for him completely identical with figuring out rationally what is the most right thing to do in every situation that he faced.
This shows in the constant alternation in his diary between religious language invoking “God” and non-religious language expressing the same experiences and ambitions. For example, while often he thinks of himself as “serving God,” in other passages he can speak of “serving an idea.”
It is an idea you are serving — an idea which must be victorious if a mankind worth the name is to survive.
It is this idea which you must help towards victory with all your strength – not the work of human hands which just now gives you responsibility and the responsibility of creating a chance to further it.
Knowing this, it should be easy for you to smile at criticism of decisions misunderstood, ridicule of expressions misinterpreted as ‘idealism’, declarations of war to the death upon that to which, for all outward appearances, you are devoting your life.
Not that Hammarskjold failed to recognize a strain between living out his self-conception as God’s instrument in the world, and his need to maintain a social identity determined by his place in various political organizations.
First, here is an extraordinary statement of his self-conception as God’s instrument in the world — without people like him, God’s presence would not be felt in the world:
Your responsibility is indeed terrifying. If you fail, it is God, thanks to your having betrayed Him, who will fail mankind. You fancy you can be responsible to God; can you carry the responsibility for God?
But of course Hammarskjold’s career in international diplomacy would have come to a screeching halt if he had announced to the world that his life task was to act as a necessary instrument of God’s presence in the world, so that spiritual failure on his part would amount to “God failing the world.” He would have been dismissed by religious and non-religious people alike as a fanatic megalomaniac.
He is very aware of this, facing in a very honest way the implications of his own internal spiritual self-conception, and the personal strain this caused because of its conflict with the public self-presentation made necessary by his career. His resolution of this conflict was to resolutely stay within the bounds of the social and political roles he was assigned by government and international bodies in which he played a part, and just to put up with the “exhausting” inner strain that resulted, “because mankind has laid down once and for all the organized rules of social behavior.”
While performing the part which is truly ours, how exhausting it is to be obliged to play a role which is not ours: the person you must really be, in order to fulfill your task, you must not appear to others to be, in order to be allowed by them to fulfill it. How exhausting — but unavoidable, since mankind has laid down once and for all the organized rules for social behaviour.
This last point is one of several features of Hammarskjold’s spirituality that makes it adaptable for persons who might initially hesitate to compare their lives to that of the Secretary General of the UN. That is, it shows that Hammarskjold’s kind of spirituality has no very direct connection with any particular career or lifestyle, but can be lived out in almost any kind of external life circumstances.
This is true also because the center of Hammarskjold’s self-conception — being a selfless embodiment and instrument of a higher rightness in a world not very right — can be generalized and applied to all life circumstances, even the apparently “smallest” everyday social interactions, such as in family and business life.
Hammarskjold seems very aware of the way in which his high spiritual and political ambitions can “shut his heart,” affecting negatively his more “ordinary everyday” interactions with others.
The ‘great’ commitment is so much easier than the ordinary everyday one – and can all too easily shut our hearts to the latter. A willingness to make the ultimate sacrifice can be associated with, and even produce, a great hardness of heart.
And in fact many have noted the fact that his diary contains not one direct reference to specific political involvements in his public career. In those passages where he does reflect on his public behavior, this typically involves interactions with other individuals that are his subordinates in organizations he was involved in.
Your position never gives you the right to command. It only imposes on you the duty of so living your life that others can receive your orders without being humiliated.
Twice now you have done him an injustice. In spite of the fact that you were ‘right’ or, more correctly, because you were, in your conceit and your stupid pride in your powers you went stumping on over ground where each step gave him pain.
As a final example: on one occasion he was evidently dealing with someone who was a good worker but difficult to get along with, which “brought him into conflict with everybody,” so that “justice to others” demanded that he be confronted with this and perhaps fired. At a meeting, the person at first defended his innocence, but Hammarskjold and others pointedly demonstrated all the lies and contradictions in his defense and “bit by bit, stripped him naked before his own eyes.” Then he broke down sobbing and said to them, “But why did you never help me, why didn’t you tell me what to do?”
Hammarskjold takes this blame upon himself, commenting, “It is always the stronger one who is to blame.”
In the end, we were in fact to blame. We had not voiced our criticisms, but we had allowed them to stop us from giving him a single word of acknowledgment, and in this way had barred every road to improvement.” He blames himself for taking the easy way out. “Instinctively, we try to eliminate a person from our sphere of responsibility as soon as… [he] appears in our eyes to be a failure.”
Appendix: The Hammarskjold-Murrow Radio Interview in Full
This piece was written by Hammarskjold just after he became Secretary General of the UN, for Edward R. Murrow’s radio program ‘This I Believe,’ a series of statements of personal philosophy and spiritual belief by prominent men and women, later published in book form under the same title. This statement is included in Volume 2, published in 1954.)
The world in which I grew up [he was born in 1905] was dominated by principles and ideals of a time far from ours and, as it may seem, far removed from the problems facing a man of the middle of the twentieth century. However, my way has not meant a departure from those ideals. On the contrary, I have been led to an understanding of their validity also for our world of today. Thus, a never abandoned effort frankly and squarely to build up a personal belief in the light of experience and honest thinking has led me in a circle; I now recognize and endorse, unreservedly, those very beliefs which were once handed down to me.
From generations of soldiers and government officials on my father’s side I inherited a belief that no life was more satisfactory than one of selfless service to your country – or humanity. This service required a sacrifice of all personal interests, but likewise the courage to stand up unflinchingly for your convictions.
From scholars and clergymen on my mother’s side I inherited a belief that, in the very radical sense of the Gospels, all men were equals as children of God, and should be met and treated by us as our masters in God.
Faith is a state of the mind and the soul. In this sense we can understand the words of the Spanish mystic, St. John of the Cross: ‘Faith is the union of God with the soul.’ The language of religion is a set of formulas which register a basic spiritual experience. It must not be regarded as describing, in terms to be defined by philosophy, the reality which is accessible to our senses and which we can analyze with the tools of logic. I was late in understanding what this meant. When I finally reached that point, the beliefs in which I was once brought up and which, in fact, had given my life direction even while my intellect still challenged their validity, were recognized by me as mine in their own right and by my free choice.
I feel that I can endorse those convictions without any compromise with the demands of that intellectual honesty which is the very key to maturity of mind.
The two ideals which dominated my childhood world met me fully harmonized and adjusted to the demands of our world of today in the ethics of Albert Schweitzer, where the ideal of service is supported by and supports the basic attitude to man set forth in the Gospels. In his work I also found a key for modern man to the world of the Gospels.
But the explanation of how man should live a life of active social service in full harmony with himself as a member of the community of the spirit, I found in the writings of those great medieval mystics for whom ‘self-surrender’ had been the way to self-realization, and who in ‘singleness of mind’ and ‘inwardness’ had found strength to say yes to every demand which the needs of their neighbors made them face, and to say yes also to every fate life had in store for them when they followed the call of duty, as they understood it. Love – that much misused and misinterpreted word – for them meant simply an overflowing of the strength with which they felt them selves filled when living in true self-oblivion. And this love found natural expressions in an unhesitant fulfillment of duty and in an unreserved acceptance of life, whatever it brought them personally of toil, suffering—or happiness.
I know that their discoveries about the laws of inner life and of action have not lost their significance.
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