Sigrid Undset on the compulsion of conversion

Converting to Catholicism is never an 'aesthetic', it's an acknowledgement of reality

Mass being said inside Sigrid Undset’s home in Lillehammer.

When Sigrid Undset converted to Catholicism in 1924, it shocked much of the literary world - she was from Norway, after all, a country where Lutheranism was the official state religion, just as it was in neighboring Sweden, Finland, and Denmark. Scandinavians at the time simply were not papists, it wasn’t done.

As Undset continued to grow in literary prominence, especially after she won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1928, the Scandinavian literary community struggled to reconcile both her acclaimed talent and her Catholic conversion, which was viewed as baffling. Additionally, for many within the circles of intellectuals Undset had fraternized with during her 20s and early 30s, anti-Catholic sentiment was the norm. Thus, effort was applied to explain away Undset’s conversion as one simply born from aesthetic preferences.

Many commentators and elites began to tout the narrative that Undset had converted to Catholicism after being so immersed within the Medieval Catholic world while writing her masterpiece, Kristin Lavransdatter, that she simply fell in love with her own romantic depictions of the religion. A woman choosing to become Catholic for the mystique or spiritual aura was much more palatable than the notion of an intelligent, strong, talented woman choosing to submit herself to the Church of Rome because she actually believed the doctrines of the faith.

This belittling spin on Undset’s conversion has continued to dog her biographical depictions well into the 21st century, though I think a resurgence of Undset’s work among Catholics has recently begun to drive momentum towards finally expunging this erroneous narrative. Any theologically informed Catholic reading Kristin Lavransdatter or Olav Audunnson would quickly perceive that the author’s grasp of the Catholic faith is anything but surface level or merely aesthetic.

Additionally, we increasingly are gaining access to the treasure trove of Undset’s essays and articles written during her life that make it utterly clear that Undset’s Catholic conversion was one firmly based in her recognition of the doctrines of the faith as the clearest expressions of reality, not a wish-fulfillment for a romanticized era.

One such essay that expresses this succinctly is Undset’s succinct piece, “2 +2 = 5”, originally published posthumously in the archdiocesan monthly journal St. Olav in 1965. In it, Undset is very clear about how she feels towards these false narratives, writing, ““I have never seen people become Catholic because they “admire the beauty of the Catholic Church” or think that there is merit in the fact that Catholicism “permits us to worship the feminine also” - despite the fact that I continually meet people who say such things” ¹. Undset argues that there are two sorts of conversions, one resulting from an individual long journey of attraction to some element of the Church that speaks to an encountered spiritual reality, and one that results from recognition that the Church gives the truest answers to the questions of what we are, why we are, and the moral realities that humans exist within. A real conversion is, “completely different from a catholicizing aestheticism or sentimentality which causes some soul to wander around and around the Catholic Church for years and look at her in the manner of tourists”, and this is certainly true ². As someone who directs the OCIA program at her local parish and has met with hundreds of individuals discerning Catholicism, I can speak from personal experience to the reality that those individuals who initiate an inquiring into Catholicism simply because they like the aesthetic (and I’ve certainly spoken with a good number of such individuals), those individuals do not actually end up converting or cultivating a real relationship with God. They are, as Undset assesses, tourists who like gazing around at the odd novelty they identify as Catholicism, but have no interest in any actual relationship of love, as it would require a submission of the will they definitively do not identify as ‘aesthetic’.

On a wider scope, Undset took umbrage with the condescending modern attitude that viewed past religions as a coping mechanism of the masses, a mere means of psychologically duping one’s self into handling the nastiness of life better – Marx’s ‘opium of the people’. She writes, “The proclamation of all heathen religions is not a longing for comfort, not even a longing for salvation, as much as a longing for clarity. The question of first and last things has engaged mankind more deeply than the question of their own weal and woe”; for Undset, her own personal longing for clarity was what eventually carried her into the Catholic Church ³. She was convinced, long before she converted, that Catholicism offered the truest comprehensive understanding of the reality of human existence. Eventually, that conviction grew so powerful it overcame what she described as man’s “natural reaction of fear and mistrust to one who calls himself the way, the truth, and the life” ⁴.

From childhood, Undset had long been suspicious of individuals who conveniently identified their own personal preferences as truth. These misgivings are the core reason she never gave Norwegian Lutheranism any credence whatsoever, writing, “The fault with Protestant teaching about Christianity was that each preacher had his own “personal conviction” and his “subjective understanding”. So that we came to be convinced that faith was a minor matter: they who spoke to us in the name of Christianity had in reality given up the historic Christianity as a teaching no longer maintainable, but, purely on emotional grounds, they would not give up a view of life which was colored by Christianity” ⁵. Undset’s suspicion of those who ‘discovered’ truth happened to align exactly with how their own desires bent continued into adulthood within the atheistic intelligentsia that became her closest peers. She wrote, “The new humanistic and godless religions with which preachers tried to snare us as we entered into the world of adults were truly even less able to overcome our difficulties as young sceptics. If we had met only one type of atheism, probably there would have been great danger of our being ensnared by it. But, thank God, there were as many sects of atheism as there are of Protestant Christianity - many too many for us to take them seriously!”, conveying the depth of her skeptical nature ⁶. Despite this constant skepticism and her subsequent persisting agnosticism, at the same time, Undset could not completely quell the questions about reality, humanity, and the supernatural that persistently disturbed her soul. She wrote that, “The modern heathenism is a new thing – a declaration of war against a God who has spoken, where the old heathenism was a love song to a God who hid himself, or an attempt to live with the divine whose power men felt around them”, and Undset recognized that she too still felt that divine power all around her ⁷.

Surrounded by this ‘divine power’ whose presence she felt increasingly undeniable as she got older, Undset’s skepticism eventually had to be turned towards her own beliefs:

“But after we had laughed long and well at all the others who preached their own illusions and idiosyncrasies, we had to ask ourselves: But you, who have no trust in the subjective faith of others – what is your own faith? You think that you have seen through the naïvete in the solipsisms of others. But then you cannot believe in yourself without resigning from the brotherhood of man.” ⁸

Essentially, Undset realized that she could not consider herself the one exception to her suspicion that individuals who claimed to live their lives in accordance with their personal truth were simply enslaved to their own preferences and desires. She too must be a part of that human impulse to try to divinize one’s own tastes and inclinations. The only solution Undset found sufficiently strong enough to pull humanity up out of the depths of their fantasies and illusions was the Catholic Church, a strength that stemmed from its audacious claim to a singular authority.

Undset recognized that humanity had always despised the notion of such an ultimate authority, pointing out:

“Thus far, it is natural enough for “modern man” to attempt with all his life force to escape the authority of the Catholic Church - for many years, it would seem, we have tried to escape from any conceivable kind of authority. These escape attempts and the fight against a Church which has always openly confessed that she demands authority are not unique to “modern” man; they are factors manifested in full force in Jerusalem in the days immediately before Easter in the year our Lord was crucified.” ⁹

For Undset, the unique authority claimed by the Catholic Church was one of the most difficult obstacles to her conversion; it was also the element that ultimately catalyzed it. The very boldness of the Church’s claim to hold the fullness of truth and Divine Revelation here on Earth was at once antagonizing and compelling. Undset wrote,

“We discovered that all those who try to encapsulate themselves in their own self-created illusions were united in fearing, hating, and trying to avoid this power. If they were not united about anything else, they were united on one thing: opposition to the Catholic Church. And we discovered that there was also something in our own human nature that rose up in opposition against her claim. It was a resistance which was not like our smiling doubt in the face of all the religious constructions of other people and all the other views of life which had been offered to us. It was as if we had come to deal with an element from another world. And for the first time in our life, we felt a fear of the supernatural.” ¹⁰

Thus, after her skepticism had driven her to cast aside the plurality of Protestant positions and atheistic constructions as fanciful human concoctions, Undset remained unable to ignore the Catholic Church because she found the authority which did not give way to subjective preferences as totally inhuman.

As she found herself more and more compelled by the Catholic worldview and understanding of reality, Undset did not find her initial persuasion warm or fuzzy, writing, “Some of us felt for a long time like wild beasts who had fallen into the power of the hound of heaven” ¹¹. Her somewhat terrified acceptance reminds me of when I first learned about the reality of sex as an indignant ten year old - I accepted the new reality I was exposed to (it certainly made sense of a number of questions), but I was not pleased that this was the way of the world. It’s quite understandable Undset found those who tried to spin her conversion as surface level so aggravating; her conversion had been one born from a collision of her own fierce will with the undeniable reality she encountered within Catholicism, and it had been at times painful. To paint it as a whimsical jaunt into a new aesthetic degraded the meaning of Undset’s active decision to submit her life to Christ in His Church, fully knowing it meant accepting the Cross as well as salvation from God. Later in life, as Undset experienced that Cross through much pain and suffering and loneliness, I think a great deal of her critics took a bit of savage joy in pointing at her and saying, ‘See? Look how idyllic and aesthetic her life is now, guess that Catholicism really didn’t deliver’, whereas Undset, who always possessed a complete understanding of the faith, knew that suffering was always going to be a reality of the experience.

Undset felt that she, and other converts like her who had come to the church through first intense doubt, then conviction, and finally conversion, had a unique role to play as witnesses for the Church:

“Perhaps this is the task which has been given us, we who have doubted everything and everyone before coming to faith in Jesus Christ in his Mystical Body, the Church – that we should bear witness to the impotence of men’s arrogance against His power. For our arrogance was indeed not small, and it was strong, as the arrogance of lonely men always is. And we confess that we are his prisoners, and his yoke is easy and his burden light.” ¹²

Uniquely, Undset could speak from her experience to say that she wasn’t Catholic because it made her feel better, she wasn’t Catholic because it made the messiness of life easier to cope with, she certainly wasn’t Catholic because it was a delightful aesthetic; she was Catholic because she could not be otherwise. She had encountered the reality of Catholicism so clearly and convincingly, that as a person passionate about truth to an almost brutal extent, her being necessitated it. Thankfully, as she acknowledges, living in reality produces a yoke both easy and light.

The benefits of living one’s life in accordance with reality, free of our personal illusions, is the meaning behind the somewhat odd title of “2 + 2 = 5”. Undset writes at the essay’s outset, “At times it occurs to all of us that it is downright trivial for two and two to make four. If one first accepts this boring doctrine, then it clearly opens the way for the development of very many different human talents and possibilities”, pointing out that it may seem mundane to accept basic truths, but that such acceptance is the foundation to humanity’s capacity to fully realize its potential ¹³. To live outside of reality, to live as if 2 + 2 = 5, ultimately restricts one’s capacity to exist at all. For Sigrid Undset, as much as it was painful to submit to an authority, it was this desire of hers to have fullness of being, to have life and have it more abundantly, that drove her conversion to Catholicism.

1. 208, Undset, Sigrid. Sigrid Undset on Saints and Sinners: New Translations and Studies : Papers Presented at a Conference Sponsored by the Wethersfield Institute, New York City, April 24, 1993. Edited by Deal Wyatt Hudson, Ignatius Press, 1993.

2. Ibid, 208

3. Ibid, 210

4. Ibid, 207

5. Ibid, 209

6. Ibid, 209

7. Ibid, 211

8. Ibid, 211

9. Ibid, 207

10. Ibid, 212

11. Ibid, 212

12. Ibid, 213

13. Ibid, 206