Vidkun Quisling - Religious and Philosophical Views

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.