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Sigrid Undset’s writing takes its place as one of the truly remarkable phenomena in the literature of the twentieth century. She is, wrote a Swedish critic in 1927, the year before she received the Nobel Prize, one of the very few contemporary authors of whom one may well use the adjective “great.” That is no exaggeration. In scarcely any of her contemporaries do we find human life treated with comparable breadth of vision and depth of insight. In her thought and imagination, subjects from the present and from distant times are touched by the same convincing assurance and creative power. On her stage she presents characters from the Middle Ages who are as much alive as any of her creations from the present.… She is in fact not only contemporary with her own time but also with the past, with history.…

Writing about the present and writing about the past do not belong to two distinct periods in her activity as an author, the one a closed chapter followed by the other. There are close links between them all the time. The past is not far away when she writes of the present, nor the present when she writes of the past.…

She is bolder in her description of reality than were most of her great predecessors. The picture she gives of humanity, the passions, hate and love, betrayal and loyalty, the idyllic and the tragic, of the whole of life from the movement of the embryo in the womb to the withering of the body and death, from the smell of blood which a human child draws in as it comes into the world up to the highest forms of conscious existence—all this is presented by her without a trace of romantic idealization or artificiality. Few writers have seen deeper into the unpleasantness of life, into mankind’s destitution and wretchedness. We should not close our eyes, she said in a talk to other Catholic writers in America during the last war, to “what a shocking business human life is.” But she does not close her eyes to what is most shocking of all: man’s own guilty responsibility for his wretchedness. Here too she is without fear; indeed it is in this that her special daring, the boldness she has in greater measure than most of us, is displayed.

At first glance, the robust realism of Sigrid Undset may seem to stand far removed from the writing of this group. It would be difficult to conceive a greater disparity, as far as the means of artistic presentation are concerned, than that between James Joyce and Franz Kafka on the one side and Sigrid Undset on the other, or, to choose a Norwegian author, between Sigurd Christiansen and Sigrid Undset. With Christiansen one finds an intense concentration on the inner mental processes of a single character, and little attention is paid to the outer world. Sigrid Undset probes no less deeply into the inner life, but her work shows too that breadth of background description which is typical of the realistic novel, and the sharpest possible insight into the conditions imposed on the characters by their social position and milieu. There are however points of contact, for example in the essential part which memory, the great mysterious factor in our mental life, plays in the writing of these authors. And further, not all of these “Neo-Realists” lose themselves in the subconscious world or in the subhuman; they are brought face to face with what is specifically human: the spiritual in man. The religious factor, the craving for eternity, asserts itself. To take a single example amongst many we may name Franz Kafka, one of the great religious writers of our time.

In her outlook, however, Sigrid Undset’s closest connection with present-day literature and the whole contemporary world of ideas is not to be found in the movement here briefly described. It lies rather on a broader plane, is less purely literary and closer to the common stuff of humanity; it is to be sought in that Christian-inspired movement which has expressed itself in many ways in twentieth-century thought, and which in literature has made itself so firmly felt that it has rightly been called a Christian Renaissance.

A Christian Renaissance in the twentieth century? It sounds paradoxical. The opposition which Christianity has faced perpetually since its foundation—more than any other of the great world religions—has never appeared more aggressive than in this period, the century of Communism, Fascism, and Nazism. The fight waged against the Church by Voltaire, in the eighteenth century, for example, was not prompted by any ideological hostility to the Christian ethical values. Jesus of Nazareth is the Master, because in His eyes all men are equal, are the words in the Dictionnaire Philosophique. The paganism of the twentieth century, on the other hand, sees in the Christian religion the decisive, indeed the essential, obstacle to the realization of its program for human society. It attacks the entire Christian faith—and not without cause, for it seeks also to destroy the Christian ethic.

This intensified struggle against Christianity is certainly one of the reasons for the Christian reawakening of our time. The repudiation of Christianity, which had been formerly a part of the enthusiastic and optimistic faith in “progress” and which was largely a product of intellectual debating circles, entered a new phase when great nations began to put this idea of the abolition of the Christian faith into practice. With reference to his visit to Soviet Russia, André Gide writes, “Ignorance and denial of the Gospel and of all that has followed from it cannot but lead to the impoverishment of humanity and culture.” But the Christian movement in modern literature is not the outcome of panic. It is important to recollect that its roots go deeper than the first World War and the explosions which opened the floodgates to the modern paganism. To writers and thinkers in many countries it had long been clear what the repudiation of Christianity and the general secularization of humanity would entail. In an article called “War and Literature,” Sigrid Undset writes, with reference to this, “It happens that a writer seems to see in advance the gloom through which we must pass—‘the dark places’—and seeks to find a way out.”

The Christian writing and thought of the twentieth century possess a markedly realistic, sometimes almost antiromantic, character. They have nothing in common with that “retreat from the world” which was at times the chief feature of the so-called literary conversions of the late nineteenth century. Admittedly, no one would think of classifying as mere superficial products of their age the Jacob’s wrestle of August Strindberg, Léon Bloy’s burning witness, the profound Catholic faith of Johannes Jørgensen, or Arne Garborg’s restless search for some God to believe in. But these do not possess that intimate contact with reality which characterizes the twentieth-century group of Christian writers and thinkers. There is an upsurge of healthiness in this group, a deep love for the normal and eternally human and for ordinary common sense. The lyric poetry of Paul Claudel is a hymn to the sensible concrete world, God’s creation, and is sustained by the Psalmist’s theme: the heavens show forth the glory of God. The religious poetry of Olav Aukrust, revealing Christian influence as it does, yet shows the divine acknowledgment side by side with the richest sensuousness. G. K. Chesterton’s apology for the Christian religion sparkles with wit, humor, and down-to-earth humanity. T. S. Eliot binds poetry to the realities of contemporary social life in a way which not only means a revolution in verse technique, but also—and this is the important point—unveils the everlasting banality of a Godforsaken world: The Waste Land. But there is no Weltschmerz. The created holds within itself a message from the Creator: “We praise Thee, O God, for Thy glory displayed in all the creatures of the earth.” In their vital concern with contemporary problems, the new Christian thinkers, with Bergson as one of their forerunners and with Maritain, Gilson, Scheler, Berdiaev, and others numbered amongst them, are raising the central question of all philosophy. Philosophia perennis, the doctrine that mankind belongs essentially to a supernatural world of the spirit, scarcely occupies the weakest bastion in twentieth-century thought. Modern society is analyzed and criticized, but the criticism is animated by a living consciousness of the tradition behind it. Past and future are bound together, thanks to “the Christian road we have discovered” (Charles Péguy). And it is no less important that man does not take for granted the conviction that, when there is something wrong, the fault lies outside himself. Someone, writes Sigrid Undset, had to be led to the thought “that there is nothing wrong with the world other than the will of man” (in a private letter, dated January 1, 1948). The novels of François Mauriac, Georges Bernanos, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, and Sigrid Undset herself, to mention a few amongst many, give some of the most penetrating psychological studies of our time, often agonizing in their merciless unveiling. They show us perhaps the least popular picture of mankind, man as “the architect of his own misfortune,” to quote Sigrid Undset again. Paul Valéry writes that the Christian religion demands self-examination; it “sets the human mind to the most subtle of problems, the most important and the most fruitful.” It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that psychological realism begins in earnest with the Confessions of Saint Augustine.

Sigrid Undset is the Christian realist par excellence. More than any other writer she gathers together the threads of the European realist tradition. Her writing has grown organically out of the powerful presentation of everyday reality which we meet in the nineteenth-century novel and which is the essence of literary realism. But the preconditions go further back in time, to Shakespeare and his contemporaries and to Chaucer. “One thinks of Dickens when one reads Chaucer,” she writes; “they are closely related, both were realists who described the actuality they found before them—and it was a better actuality than we can find.” And her roots go back to the Icelandic family sagas. She once described the reading of Njáls Saga as a turning point in her life. It was precisely the intense realism of the saga which gripped her. But gradually the Christian point of view becomes decisive for her presentation of life, the attitude which gives to the ordinary average man a completely new significance, placing on him an emphasis quite unknown in non-Christian thinking. The realism of Christianity is indomitable, she writes. Even as a schoolgirl she had been impressed by the realism of the stories in the Bible. It was by virtue of her Christian outlook that she learned to see all human relationships not in isolation and abstraction but collectively, to see her characters not only in relation to the commonplace, to the age or society in which they lived, but also as creatures in relation to the Creator, and then to treat this motive, as she herself says, “as a fact just as realistic as any erotic impulse or longing for earthly happiness.”

This essay serves as the Introduction to Sigrid Undset: A Study in Christian Realism.

Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.

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The featured image is “Lucy Hessel Reading” (1913) by Edouard Vuillard, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

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