(Click here for a Platonist approach to questions about Hammarskjold and God.)
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 students reading Hammarskjold's extremely introverted
spiritual diary without keeping in mind his extremely active and successful
public career, get the impression of a man sometimes so depressed one wonders
how he could get out of bed in the morning. Another impression some 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 we 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.
******
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,
1. 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."
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. 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.
2. 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 earlier 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.