Stages on the Road

By Sigrid Undset and Elizabeth Scalia

Sigrid Undset is among the great modern writers of the twentieth century and was an adult convert to Catholicism. This forgotten treasure from the Nobel Prize–winning author of Kristin Lavransdatter is a fascinating collection of saints’ lives, a prophetic critique of modernity, and a surprisingly contemporary take on being Catholic—in particular a Catholic woman—in a sometimes-hostile secular world. Stages on the Road is a series of essays about the relationship between the Church and the modern world.

In the spirit of G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis, Undset points to inconsistencies, hypocrisies, and blind spots of the modern secular mindset by introducing readers to the stories of somewhat-forgotten Catholic figures like St. Angela Merici and the English martyrs Margaret Clitherow and Robert Southwell—people who stood fast to their faith in the face of both intellectual and political hostility. Undset tackles such topics as religious freedom, Christian/Muslim relations, and the vocation of women.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ave Maria Press
• Release date: Jun 18, 2012
• ISBN: 9780870612701

Sigrid Undset

Sigrid Undset (1882-1949) was a Norwegian novelist. Born in Denmark, Undset moved with her family to Norway at the age of two. Raised in Oslo, Undset was on track to attend university before her father’s death derailed the family’s economic stability. At 16, Undset started working as a secretary for an engineering firm while writing and studying on the side. After a voluminous novel set in the Nordic Middle Ages failed to find a publisher, Undset made her literary debut at 25 with Fru Marta Oulie, a short realist novel about a middle-class Norwegian woman. Over the next decade, she published at a prodigious rate, earning a reputation as a rising star in Norwegian literature with such novels as Jenny (1911) and Vaaren (1914). This success allowed her to quit her job as a secretary in order to dedicate herself to her writing. Shaken by the First World War, however, Undset converted to Catholicism and began to shift away from realism toward spiritual and moral themes. Between 1920 and 1922, she published her magnum opus Kristin Lavransdatter, a trilogy set in Norway in the Middle Ages that secured her the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature. A longtime critic of Adolph Hitler, Undset was forced to flee Norway following the Nazi invasion in 1940. She made her way via Sweden to the United States, where she lived for the remainder of the war. Undset returned to Norway in 1945, spending her final years in Lillehammer.

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"Undset always had a keen appreciation for the spiritual drama within what may be described, from the outside, as the ordinary life. This is reflected in her Saga of Saints, a history of those saints who had helped shape Christianity in Norway, in which she permits holiness to shine through without denying or obscuring the struggles and difficulties of the Church. It is also evident in her book Stages on the Road, a collection of essays on Ramon Lull, Angela Merici, Robert Southwell and Margaret Clitherow. . . . We are fortunate that so much of her work was rapidly translated into English and widely circulated in that language. . . . For Undset the preeminent human drama was also a divine drama: on one side is the Father’s initiation of redemption and the Son’s entrance into history; on the other is each person’s attachment to the wrong things, an ineffable yearning for the freedom of the children of God, and a little-understood yet still-desperate thirst for grace. This drama works itself out in uncounted ways, an often discordant composition of both the gold and the dross of daily life, resonating at every level of being, and altering—for good or ill—everything we touch. In Undset we find the consummate Catholic author, seeing life both steadily and whole, and unveiling for us its deep and ultimate meaning as we read."

Jeffrey A. Mirus

President

Trinity Communications

"Through six long-form essays, Sigrid Undset’s sprightly prose gallops so nimbly one forgets one is reading biography and surrenders to these stories as to the most compelling fiction—traveling through error and ego with Ramon Lull of Palma and sharing Angela of Merici’s itchy sense of discontent and mission. We compare present challenges to the faith against the underground maneuverings of Robert Southwell and Margaret Clitherow and find both instruction and perspective in their placidity, even as we revel at the terrible romance of their martyrdoms. First published in English in 1934, Undset’s Stages on the Road remains a thumping good read that has something to say to the era, and more than validates her reemergence in the twenty-first century as an energetic, passionate voice—one that urges the faithful onward, and onward still, through brambles of history and passing modern trends, toward a Truth that is startlingly alive."

Elizabeth Scalia

The Anchoress on Patheos

Translated from the Norwegian by Arthur G. Chater. Originally published in 1934 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

____________________________________

Foreword copyright © 2012 by Elizabeth Scalia.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever except in the case of reprints in the context of reviews, without written permission from Christian Classics™, Ave Maria Press®, Inc., P.O. Box 428, Notre Dame, IN 46556.

Founded in 1865, Ave Maria Press is a ministry of the United States Province of Holy Cross.

www.christian-classics.com

Paperback: ISBN-10 0-87061-258-1 ISBN-13 978-0-87061-258-9

E-book: ISBN-10 0-87061-270-0 ISBN-13 978-0-87061-270-1

Cover image © Helder Joaquim Soares Almeida / SuperFusion / SuperStock .

Cover and text design by Katherine Robinson Coleman.

Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Undset, Sigrid, 1882–1949.

[Etapper (ny række). English]

Stages on the road / Sigrid Undset ; [translated from the Norwegian by Arthur G. Chater].

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references (p. ).

ISBN 978-0-87061-258-9 (pbk.) -- ISBN 0-87061-258-1 (pbk.)

1. Catholics--Biography. 2. Catholic Church--Doctrines. I. Title.

BX4651.3.U5313 2012

282.092’2--dc23

[B]

2012006169

CONTENTS

A Note on the Text

Foreword by Elizabeth Scalia

Preface to the English Edition

CHAPTER

1 Ramón Lull of Palma

CHAPTER

2 St. Angela Merici: A Champion of the Woman’s Movement

CHAPTER

3 Robert Southwell, S.J.: Priest, Poet, Martyr

CHAPTER

4 Margaret Clitherow

CHAPTER

5 To St. James: Proposal for a New Prayer

CHAPTER

6 Reply to a Parish Priest

Notes

A NOTE ON THE TEXT

This edition of Stages on the Road was set from the 1934 English-language edition of the work published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf. In addition to Americanizing the spelling and occasionally altering the punctuation in the interest of clarity, the editors have moved the original footnotes to the back of the book.

The contemporary reader should also be aware that several of the figures mentioned in the book have been canonized since the work was first published, including St. Thomas More (1935), St. John Fisher (1935), St. Edmund Campion (1970), St. Robert Southwell (1970), St. Margaret Clitherow (1970), and St. John Ogilvie (1976).

FOREWORD

Nearly a century has passed since Sigrid Undset wrote the essays that would eventually be collected and published under this title, and indeed Stages on the Road is evocative of the life of faith, wholly explored and lived out—unpacked depot by depot, as it were—from the spiritual nursery, to precarious venturing forth, to stepping back in wonder or doubt, to the nearly inevitable and deepening darkness that, for all its pain, accesses an interior cave of Oneness, solitary yet completed in the companionship of Christ. This last stage is something akin to what St. Catherine of Siena referred to as the inner cell or the cell of true self-knowledge. Undset, like Catherine, a Third Order Dominican, shared with that clear-eyed Doctor an impatience with the sort of illusions bred by social conventions and encouraged by trends. Raised by progressively minded atheists, Undset realized while still a teenager that ideologies and their accompanying isms gave inadequate measures of the world and humanity, always narrowing truth precisely at the point where what is required is a broadness of understanding and the oxymoronic-sounding bold nuance of genuinely small-c catholic thinking. Sketching her autobiography for some editors in 1940, Undset wrote, [World War I] and the years afterwards confirmed the doubts I always had about the ideas I was brought up on—(I felt) that liberalism, feminism, nationalism, socialism, pacifism, would not work, because they refused to consider human nature as it really is.

Sigrid Undset’s life was a heavy one, and it seems if she could not have joy, she was determined to have light. Seeking after the clarity that sees past times and trends to what is eternal and true, and unwilling to live her life in ideological self-containment, it is not surprising that Undset would eventually come to call the Catholic Church home, or that she would credit the saints with delivering her to its doors. Undset’s fiction is populated with vividly drawn characters—people of action whose narratives are built very precisely upon human nature as it really is, including the propensity for doubt and regret. To discover genuine men and women living boldly—not excused from those same propensities, yet mysteriously delivered of them in the promise of a life in and with Christ, must have been for Undset a moment of staggering, irresistible illumination. Undset states:

By degrees my knowledge of history convinced me that the only thoroughly sane people, of our civilization at least, seemed to be those queer men and women the Catholic Church calls Saints. They seemed to know the true explanation of man’s undying hunger for happiness—his tragically insufficient love of peace, justice, and goodwill to his fellow men, his everlasting fall from grace. Now it occurred to me that there might possibly be some truth in the original Christianity. . . . But if you desire to know the truth about anything, you always run the risk of finding it. And in a way we do not want to find the Truth—we prefer to seek and keep our illusions. But I had ventured too near the abode of truth in my researches about God’s friends, as the Saints are called in the Old Norse texts of Catholic times. So I had to submit.

The following essays were written while Sigrid Undset was experiencing a full flush of earthly praise and material success, and it is lovely to contemplate that while the Nobel Prize committee was honoring this woman with what is arguably the most coveted award in Literature—for her epic novels Kristin Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestviken—Undset was focusing on the martyrdoms of the cheerfully subversive Margaret Clitherow and the besieged Jesuit Robert Southwell. So detached was she from the prize—called an homage rendered to a poetic genius whose roots must be in a great and well-ordered spirit—that Undset’s brief remarks at Stockholm’s banquet amounted to little more than her saying, everyone in Norway asked me to give regards to Sweden!

The church might call that a well-ordered spirit, indeed.

In these essays we encounter Undset writing in her prime, just a few years after her conversion to Catholicism, and putting her great gift for storytelling at the service of these friends who had first served her through the public living-out of their faith, and their testimonial light. Through six long-form essays, Sigrid Undset’s prose gallops so nimbly one forgets one is reading biography and surrenders to these stories as to the most compelling fiction—traveling through error and ego with Ramón Lull of Palma, sharing Angela of Merici’s itchy sense of discontent and mission. We compare present challenges to the faith against the underground maneuverings of Southwell and Clitherow and find both instruction and perspective in their placidity, even as we revel in the terrible romance of their martyrdoms. Author Bruce Bawer called Undset, half Viking, half Christian—torn between bold adventure and stark self-denial, and we see that quality again where Undset writes on social issues, as she does here in an excerpted letter to a parish priest:

We must try to make this clear to ourselves—we have no right to assume that any part of European tradition, cultural values, moral ideas, emotional wealth, which has its origin in the dogmatically defined Christianity of the Catholic Church, will continue to live a natural life, if the people of Europe reject Christianity and refuse to accept God’s supernatural grace. One might just as well believe that a tree whose roots were severed should continue to bear leaves and blossoms and fruit . . . It must be remembered that in a democratic community the general public always lives on ideas which twenty or thirty years ago were the peculiar property of a few advanced minds—and which the most advanced people of the moment have discarded as unserviceable working hypotheses.

First published in English in 1934, Undset’s Stages on the Road remains a thumping good read that is truly relevant to our era and more than validates her reemergence in the twenty-first century as an energetic, passionate, and intellectual Catholic voice—one that urges the faithful onward, and onward still, through brambles of history and passing modern trends, toward a Truth that is startlingly alive.

Elizabeth Scalia

Montauk, October 21, 2011

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH EDITION

All the articles here collected were originally written for Catholic publications in Norway and Sweden.¹ It goes without saying that very few Catholics here in Scandinavia—whether converts or children of Catholic parents—can have very much knowledge of those pages of the history of the Catholic Church which the officially recognized schoolbooks intentionally or otherwise ignore or distort. Those of our contemporaries who are or who become Catholics are probably occupied, just as much as other people, chiefly by thoughts of their own present and future. They ask whether the Church can offer an explanation of life, a way to salvation from their own most personal distress; they ask whether the Church knows of any way out of the common distress of the whole of humanity. They do not ask about the problems of past ages or the distress of people who died hundreds of years ago, or what was the attitude of the Church towards the problems and the distress of that time, or whether the problems of other ages have anything in common with those of our age. Not many people ask whether it is an immutable necessity for human beings—no matter what wealth of experience they may have acquired, no matter how they have increased their material resources and their knowledge of the created world of which they themselves are a part—continually to create circumstances which involve suffering both to themselves and others.

There is an element in the veneration of saints of which Catholics themselves are often unconscious. The cult of saints excludes the cult of success—the veneration of those people who have got on well in this world, the snobbish admiration of wealth and fame. This does not mean that a person who apparently has succeeded in the world and has led a happy life is necessarily a bad Christian who must be prepared for a painful settlement with his God and Judge when he comes to die. But it does mean that the religious business instinct which has caused people to imagine that the material welfare of individuals or nations is a sign of God’s special favor, or to see in disasters and defeats a punishment from God—that this is opposed by the Church in her veneration of saints. There is a story of a well-known Norwegian ship-owner—I have heard it connected with more than one name, so I dare say it is apocryphal, made up to fit into a fairly common line of thought—anyhow the story goes that the man did not insure his ships; this was supposed to be a proof of his trust in God. Then one day he received news that one of his ships had sunk in spite of this. The man looked up at the ceiling and sighed: O Lord God, what have I done wrong? It is human to think in this way, all too human—and of course a great number of Catholics yield to the temptation of thinking so. But it is a line of thought which the Church herself disclaims; whenever she celebrates Mass in red vestments it is a protest against this. And even among those saints who did not become martyrs there are relatively few who in their lifetime achieved a victory for the cause for which they had been fighting, if that cause was of such a nature as to demand realization in external forms; as, for instance, has been the case with most missionaries and founders of Orders.

Whether Christianity has made it on the whole easier or more difficult for men to live here on earth is a question on which there will never be agreement. It finally depends on what we believe about the mystical buoyant instinct in men from which all religion has originated—whether it is the answer within us to the call from a Person—or from personalities—that we can hear but cannot see, or whether it is a kind of growing pains in the human race, regarded as an organism which is impelled from within to grow upwards in vacant space.

It has been very truly said that not even when the Church of Christ was at the height of her power in the eyes of the world was she able to bring about justice and overcome uncharitableness among men. Even in those times when most men firmly believed in Heaven and Hell there were always plenty of them who preferred to brave the threat of Hell rather than renounce the joys of self-worship, the gratification of hatred and power, or subordinate themselves to a force to which their whole ego was antagonistic. The position is this, that the Christian Church can never have the right to suppress what her Founder has said about eternal perdition. But it is equally certain that what the Church has achieved has not been achieved by frightened instruments who shrank in slavish terror before the wrath of a cruel God. She has accomplished it through her saints who had the heroic love of God—of the Uncreated Creator and of the created world, in which the fight is for or against God. The sectarian animosity against the cult of saints is one of the reasons which have made it possible to represent Christianity as a religion of fear, not of heroism.

A great deal of the matter in the present book will not be new to English-speaking readers—at all events not to English Catholics. To Norwegian readers it was for the most part entirely unknown. And the essays were written partly with the object of making Norwegian readers acquainted with pages of history with which, for good reasons, the public in a Protestant country has been kept in ignorance. To give any complete list of the various authorities I have used in the preparation of these studies is no longer possible. A great many of them are English—for the articles on Margaret Clitherow and Robert Southwell I have used all the monographs I could come across, besides more comprehensive works on the history of England during the century of the Reformation. My interest in Angela Merici and her struggle in the cause of women is due to my reading her life by Sister Mary Monica, of St. Martin, Ohio. This led to my getting all the available books about the history of the Order in Europe.

Sigrid Undset

Lillehammer, May 1934

CHAPTER 1

RAMÓN LULL OF PALMA

1

Infidel dog! thundered the knight, flashing a lightning glance at his captive.—And then as a rule the knight proceeds in the same strain with his thunders and lightnings. If the captive is unlucky enough to be a Jew, he will subsequently be taken in hand by the knight’s dentist, and dental treatment in the Middle Ages was even more unpleasant than it is now. The captive is just as likely to be a Mohammedan, a Saracen, and then as often as not he enjoys the author’s sympathy and is given an opportunity of showing his superiority to the poor rude and superstitious Crusader both in culture and nobility. Indeed, the relations between Christians, Mohammedans, and Jews appeared no more complicated than this to many authors of the nineteenth century.

People of the nineteenth century showed in fact a quite extraordinary degree of incapacity when they tried to understand the men and women of the Middle Ages, even when they went about it with the best of wills. I had almost said that in this case they failed most miserably; no misunderstanding has so disturbing an effect as mistaken enthusiasm. And in the nineteenth century people were really enthusiastic about certain manifestations of the spirit of the Middle Ages, so far as they were capable of discerning and misunderstanding it—medieval architecture for instance. People had discovered that Gothic was something more than a disorderly ugliness, a regrettable barbaric intermezzo between the representationist formality of late antiquity and the renaissance attempts to put the clock back—to cut a thousand years of development out of the history of Europe and aim at a linking-up with the ideas of a distant past, to prune Christianity right down to its roots and start again where primitive Christianity leaves off, a thing which the Reformers imagined to be possible. The Romanticists had a great fancy for medieval ruins: all over Europe they built sham ruins and restored those that remained—often according to the principle followed in tricking out a fine Swedish manor house of the early eighteenth century in Victorian Gothic. The effect of this was described by a friend of mine by alleging that he had seen this inscription set up over the brand-new feudal gateway: Anno 1875 Wart denna Gambla Gåhrden giorth mycket Gamblare.¹ New Gothic churches and town-halls and castellated villas were thickly sown over Germany and England. And here in the North we followed the fashion as well as we could; the open-air museum on Bygdö has a lovely collection of our great-grandfathers’ Gothic chairs with traceried backs and bead-embroidered seats. And close by is the resplendent Oscarshall, white and dainty as though made of sugar.

The fashion for Gothic was of course like all fashions a symptom of a contemporary spiritual attitude. At the beginning of the century it looked as if revolution and war had made a clean sweep of the world of the immediately preceding generations—the palaces and prisons of absolutism and the academies and ornamental gardens of the age of enlightenment. The young felt themselves to be a chosen generation, called to rebuild the world, more beautiful and better than before. Young minds of the Sturm und Drang period yearned for an outlook on life which should embrace the whole creation as a unity and at the same time open a way to infinity. Through the ego leads the vast stairway, from the lichens on the rocks to the seraphs—but the ego is not the individual ego of each little human being; it has become conscious of being a radiation from the eternal will which draws everything upward and binds everything together. It then dawned upon some of them that the outlook they were striving to formulate had points of contact with the medieval view of the world. And because they felt the need of expressing their new outlook more rapidly and more strikingly than could be done by statement and explanation, they resorted to images and symbols and parables—and discovered that much of what had been scoffed at by the rationalists as medieval childishness, crudity, and the outcome of a silly superstition, was in fact nothing but the symbols and emblems of that age. It had simply appeared meaningless to the people of the age of enlightenment in the same way as stenography looks like a meaningless scribble to those