Religious and Philosophical Views
As the son of a Church of Norway pastor, Quisling was brought up a Lutheran, and became interested in religion and metaphysics, eventually building up a library that included the works of Spinoza, Kant, Hegel and Schopenhauer, although he appears to have had little use for more modern philosophers. Though he was only an amateur philosopher, he kept up with developments in the realm of quantum physics, and blended the two into a new religion he called Universism (or Universalism), loosely based on Christianity. His original writings stretched to a claimed two thousand pages on the topic. He borrowed the term Universism from a textbook on Chinese philosophy, and described how his philosophy "followed from the universal theory of relativity, of which the specific and general theories of relativity are special instances". Quisling wanted universism to be the official state religion of his new Norway.
His magnum opus was to be divided into four parts: an introduction; a description of mankind's apparent progression from individual to increasing complex consciousnesses; a section on his tenets of morality and law; and a final section on science, art, politics, history, race and religion. The conclusion was to be entitled "The World's Organic Classification and Organisation", but the work remained unfinished; generally Quisling worked on it infrequently during his time in politics. The biographer Hans Fredrik Dahl describes this as "fortunate" since Quisling would "never have won recognition" as a philosopher.
During his trial and particularly after being sentenced, Quisling became interested once more in Universism. He saw the events of the war as part of the move towards the establishment of God's kingdom of earth, and justified his actions in those terms. During the first week of October he wrote a fifty-page document entitled Universistic Aphorisms, which represented "an almost ecstatic revelation of truth and the light to come, which bore the mark of nothing less than a prophet". The document was also notable for its attack on the materialism of National Socialism and its rejection of the racism and anti-Semitism to which he had previously subscribed. In addition, he simultaneously worked on a sermon, "Eternal Justice", which reiterated his key beliefs, including reincarnation.
Read more about this topic: Vidkun Quisling
Famous quotes containing the words religious and, religious and/or views:
“When we say “science” we can either mean any manipulation of the inventive and organizing power of the human intellect: or we can mean such an extremely different thing as the religion of science the vulgarized derivative from this pure activity manipulated by a sort of priestcraft into a great religious and political weapon.”
—Wyndham Lewis (1882–1957)
“For a truly religious man nothing is tragic.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)
“Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison. Men have various employments and pursuits which engage their attention, and give a character to the opening mind; but women, confined to one, and having their thoughts constantly directed to the most insignificant part of themselves, seldom extend their views beyond the triumph of the hour.”
—Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797)