Question: Are You Saved?

According to Sigrid Undset’s 1927 essay “Catholic Propaganda,” a Catholic will answer that question differently than a Protestant—with distinct psychological results.

Ask a Protestant if she is saved, and she’ll say yes, definitively. But, writes Undset, “no Catholic would dare to say more than that he hopes for salvation. These two answers do more than express dogmatic propositions: they have their own psychological value.”

I have been reading and writing about Undset (1882–1949), the only overtly Catholic female author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. I have written about her two epics, Kristin Lavransdatter and The Master of Hestviken. And I have been following Undset’s critical trail, which in English is quite short and weedy. My friend Moira, who has Finnish ancestors, notes that English-speaking critics ignore or dismiss Scandinavian literature.

The Undset trail led me to the New Zealander Stephen Sparrow, whose article “Sigrid Undset: Catholic Viking” led me to “Catholic Propaganda.”

Undset explains the psychological difference between Catholic and Protestant views on the question of salvation.

Psychologically, [the Protestant] is “saved” because he feels he is safe. With a Catholic, on the other hand, the most powerful feeling is one of sorrow and hope, the warp and woof of repentance. Completely aside from dogmas, he is unable truthfully to answer the question “Are you saved?” affirmatively, because his sins are ever before his eyes. No reader of the lives of the saints would dare to deny that this is the normal psychical experience of the truly “converted” Catholic. 

It strikes me that this gets at the root of what makes Undset’s highly psychological novels so astute and so inescapably Catholic—the experience of each main character that he or she is a sinner in need of redemption. What a surprise to find such an author in Lutheran Norway, where Catholics are in the extreme minority today (about 3 percent of the population) and where Undset herself was castigated from the pulpit when she converted in 1924.

In her long essay, complex both psychologically and theologically, Undset makes many fascinating points while referring to scripture and the likes of St. Thomas Aquinas. Early on, she makes a series of amusing comments about Darwin’s evolutionary theory, a cause célèbre in her day:

Apes have ears and hands, but they have neither harmonicas nor philharmonic orchestras (when I was a child I used to think, when I heard the ape theory, that if there were anything to it, the apes might become angry and do something to renounce this relation; as long as they are not bothered, we do not need to be either).  

Animals feel the temperature as do we, but only we have lit bonfires in the forest and installed electric fans in hotel dining rooms. Animals mate and we mate, but how have we not managed to complicate our sexual life — even going to such peripheral phenomena as jokes and anecdotes about mothers-in-law. The animals must have food and drink and we must have food and drink, but so far no animal, as far as I know, has thought of getting food in order to arrange an exchange of food products, for example, to organize an agency to take the leftovers of factories and wine bars and banana boats? Mankind itself has often explained its tragic isolation from the animal kingdom by conceiving of a supersensual world, peopled with invisible beings, bodiless but yet with personalities of the highest degree. And it is this world which has never left mankind at peace, and men have never been able to leave it in peace. 

Read the entire essay here.