An exceedingly rare case of a saint of both the lefthand and righthand kingdoms, civic wonderworker and mystic alike. Proposed date of commemoration: September 18.
“For all that has been—Thanks! To all that shall be—Yes!”
With these words Dag Hammarskjöld greeted the new year of 1953 in the private journal that later became known to the world as Markings. They are not the words one would have expected from him at this point in his life. The years had been painful. He was lonely, deeply lonely. His thoughts recurred to duty and not infrequently to sacrifice. He wondered if life held any meeting at all. Suicide was a temptation all the way until 1952 when, it seems, he made the final decision against it: “No! Death must be your final gift to life, not an act of treachery against it.”
Those words were prophetic. His death would be a gift to life, but taken by another’s treachery, not his own.
To all appearances he should have been happy. He was raised in a privileged and adoring family by a warmly pious mother and a father who had served as the Prime Minister of Sweden during the First World War. The family was close to Nathan Söderblom, a prominent archbishop who struggled mightily for the soul of the modern world as well as the reconciliation of Christians in the newborn ecumenical movement. Dag enjoyed one success after another, rising rapidly in the academic ranks, earning a doctorate in economics, and under the influence of Albert Schweitzer forging an ethic of universal charity. Recognized for his tremendous gifts, already as a young man he was placed in responsible positions of central banking and diplomacy.
But throughout all the worldly successes, a mighty spiritual struggle was taking place behind the calm and personable reserve. While battling doubt and despair, Dag had a growing sense that he was—that he was becoming—that he was striving to become—a disciple of Jesus Christ. The Psalms taught him to interpret his loneliness and suffering and to stay the course in prayer. The Gospels taught him that Jesus’ cross was not a self-giving centered on the self but a gift to others and for others, fully and completely, no tithe reserved to pay off the ego. The medieval mystics, especially Meister Eckhart and Thomas à Kempis, were his closest companions and guides along the way of Jesus. St. John of the Cross helped him to understand faith during the “dark night of the soul.” He returned to these mystics again and again for wisdom, finding their comtemplative practice not alien but essential to his calling. “In our era,” he later wrote, “the road to holiness necessarily passes through the world of action.” Contemplation gave him the fortitude to enter into the heart of action, even when the circumstances were wreathed in danger.
After decades of inquietude, a boundary was crossed, a yes was said, thanks were offered for the painful past. And right then, in a stroke of divine timing, the calling for which he had unknowingly been preparing all along was issued. Out of the blue, almost, Dag was elected Secretary General of the United Nations, only the second in its brief history.
He was chosen, in a sense, by accident. Dag appeared to be a pale, complaisant nobody; a good compromise candidate for the great powers ramping up for a full-blown Cold War. He took the oath of office on April 10, 1953. And in that moment Dag could see all the reasons his life unfolded as it had. Loneliness was an essential companion in his ability to give himself to the great and risky dream of world community; it made him vigilant and nonpartisan. He quickly became renowned for his untiringness, his long hours, his minimal sleep, and how despite it all he remained alert, attuned, at ease, even charming.
In a deeply divided era, though, Dag’s principled peacekeeping was not an entirely popular strategy. He declared the need for balancing the immediate debt of loyalty to one’s own nation with the best interests of the whole human family—and thus got declared a traitor to his own, a pretender accountable to nobody. He practiced a self-effacing patience to bring leaders to a conciliatory posture—and got blamed for not acting faster. He held to a fundamental humanism, a willingness to believe the best even of a humanity that repeatedly lived up to its worst—and suffered bitter disappointments. Toward the end of his life he conceded to a friend that “there are really evil persons—evil right through—only evil.” But even in face of the worst that the world could offer, Dag continually proclaimed the words of the angels: Fear not. Fear gives birth to political evil. Patience, trust, and faith nurture peace.
Upon his election, Dag was tossed into the arena of enormous global crises. At this time only a small number of nations belonged to the UN, which limited its powers of intervention. Dag could criticize but not alter the CIA-sponsored coup of the Guatemalan government, the Soviet repression of the Hungarian revolution, and China’s oppression of Tibet. His greatest victory, which may well have staved off a third world war, was to smooth over the Suez Canal crisis by crafting an honorable mutual surrender for the provocateurs.
Though ultimately less successful, Dag’s most important role was as midwife to the new nations in Africa emerging from the yoke of colonialism.
The situation in the Congo, which absorbed the last years of Dag’s life, was unspeakably appalling. There was no colonial regime more brutal that Belgium’s, as famously recounted in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—Dag’s favorite novel since his youth. There was no crime the Belgians did not commit: enslavement, murder, rape, inciting ethnic tensions, plundering natural resources. Perhaps the greatest betrayal of all lay in refusing the Congolese access to education or training in government administration, even as independence drew inevitably nearer—which guaranteed the incompetence of the new regime and left the door open for ongoing Belgian control in the region.
It was directly following the independence celebrations on June 30, 1960, that the conflagration started. Regions of the Congo started breaking off and declaring their own independent state. At one time, four self-proclaimed nations existed within the territory of the Congo. Even the officially recognized state suffered no end of intrigue and double-crossings by an unstable leadership. Kidnappings and third-party assassination attempts followed, militias and mercenaries ran riot, Belgium lurked in the background, and the Cold War powers watched eagerly for any opportunity to exploit the vacuum of power.
Dag advocated for sensible policy and rule of law, but he recognized here, as he had before, that the fate of nations lies in the character of their leaders. His thankless and often fruitless task was to negotiate a lasting peace between unsavory personalities and outright liars, all the while suffering ideologically-driven attacks on his own character on the very floor of the UN assembly. By then, however, he was so widely trusted—especially by those nations that were most decidedly not superpowers—that many world leaders came to his defense, and he stayed the course. But there was no question that Dag endured assault on every side, and the chances of a peaceable outcome were slim in any event.
After many months of nonstop labor, a glimmer of hope was in sight. Dag set off with his team to preside at negotiations between the UN-recognized Congolese government and Katanga, one of the breakoff territories. But during his flight on the night of September 18, 1961, the plane crashed and all within perished.
Foul play was suspected immediately, but the authorities on the ground dragged their feet so that more than fifteen hours passed after the crash before the plane was found. The ensuing inquiry—led by local colonial interests, who systematically discredited all the African witnesses—handed down a ruling of accident.
Only very recent new research and late-in-the-day witnesses have surfaced, proving beyond any possibility of a doubt that Dag fell victim to an assassination plot. Far from suffering engine trouble, the plane had been planted with a faulty bomb that didn’t go off on schedule. A second and possibly even third plane followed Dag’s diplomatic carrier and shot at the aircraft, thereby igniting the bomb that caused the crash. Evidence suggests that, against extraordinary odds, Hammarskjöld was thrown clear in the crash and may have even survived—only to be shot in the head by a mercenary unit waiting on the ground.
Dag was honored with a state funeral in Sweden and a procession of testimonials from the General Assembly of the UN. The Congolese delegate declared him “a martyr of peace.” On December 10, 1961, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the only person in history to receive it posthumously.
Found among Dag’s personal effects were Thomas à Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ, a copy of his oath of office as Secretary General, and the manuscript of his Swedish translation-in-progress of Jewish philosopher Martin Buber’s I and Thou. His passion for these things was known. What was not known was the manucript that Dag’s secretary discovered in his New York apartment. A cover letter on top of the manuscript addressed to Leif Belfrage, a publisher in Sweden, asked him to decide whether this “‘white book’ concerning my negotiations with myself—and with God” should be published. After some deliberation, Leif and his wife Greta decided to seek publication for, as Greta wrote in a letter to a friend, “we know, even if we will never say so to anybody else, that he was a saint.”
Whatever originals contributed to the book we now know as Markings (or more literally, Waymarks), they have long since vanished, probably destroyed by Dag himself. The epigraph reads: “Only the hand that erases can write the true thing,” a quote from Meister Eckhart. Markings is not a temporally concurrent record of Dag’s stream of consciousness. Rather, it is his mature commentary on his spiritual story, carefully selecting out for preservation what is honest to the larger whole.
In a lesser soul, this might mean revision for the sake of self-aggrandizement, to delete awkward or unflattering details. In Dag’s case, it was just the opposite. The relentless self-examination and self-criticism make Markings a book best taken in small doses. It is medicine, not food. Dag learned over the years to lay himself bare to the divine gaze: no excuses, no justifications. And precisely in so doing—scraping away the accretions of self-will—he discovered the love of God, the light of God, the presence of God. In his heart was forged a tremendous patience and long-suffering charity that would serve him supremely well as the leader of a still-new, always-fragile experiment in keeping world peace. He needed to be able to perceive the petty—or monstrous—ambitions in the politicians he dealt with; to estimate and account for the impact of leaders’ character on policy; to exhort offended dignity and justfied outrage to accept solutions shorn of revenge and humiliation. Dag knew he could not do this apart from faith, apart from faith’s relinquishment of personal claims and honors, or apart from God. Though he alluded to it at times, his faith was not a public matter. He could not share it openly while serving as the disinterested broker between politically and culturally conflicted nations.
The immediate reaction to Markings was scandal. Some went so far as to call it blasphemy, tone-deaf to Dag’s efforts to conform himself to Christ, seeing in his posture of self-sacrifice merely a messianic self-delusion. So said the secular press. But the faithful saw him otherwise: as a disciple of Christ thrust into the unprecedented situation of global peacemaking, intent on mastering the sin that would stand in the way of his service to humankind and his union with God.
It is rare to meet a saint of both kingdoms, one who wholeheartedly serves the lefthand kingdom of state, market, and culture even as he learns to speak the language of the Spirit and leaves a witness—a waymark—for others in the righthand kingdom. In Dag Hammarskjöld, God was exceptionally generous to both kingdoms. Dag’s path to holiness passed through the world of action, and the world is the better for it.
For Further Reading
Dag Hammarskjöld, Markings
Gustaf Aulén, Dag Hammarskjöld’s White Book: An Analysis of “Markings”
Roger Lipsey, Hammarskjöld: A Life
Susan Williams, Who Killed Hammarskjöld?: The UN, the Cold War and White Supremacy in Africa
Plus, there is a brand-new documentary out about Hammarskjöld’s death:
”Cold Case Hammarskjöld”