An excerpt from Undset's 1941 article "Kristen Kultur".
We know that states built on democratic foundations are far from perfect – they simply have far too many sins and delusions to account for. Promises and treaties had long been broken before the rise of totalitarian states. Politicians had given themselves to dishonesty, deception and lies well before then. Nevertheless, there was always a kind of common sense among the people, a voice warning that the most solid ground to build upon is the truth and lies are something to be avoided if possible. This should not surprise us Catholics, because democracies consist of imperfect and sinful men and women, too. In the last century, when academia and philosophy – so optimistic about the progress of mankind – attacked the Church, it did so because the Christian creed holds that mankind actually makes no progress at all. Every day, men and women have to take up the fight against evil and misery, against temptations arising from their own nature to sin by vanity, lust and cowardice. They have to battle against the oppression of the weak and the innocent by all those who yield to the temptations of evil. In this war, people will win victories, make conquests, lose and suffer defeat, but the war will continue until to the end of time. This Christian view of life calls men and women to do battle in an endless war and bids them be ever armed and on guard; never to delude themselves with false hopes that ground gained will not be threatened or not have to be defended and reconquered forever. Even when I was far from Christian, I could not understand why this Christian sceptical view of man was called reactionary or unnatural or cowardly by those who attacked it. Its opponents often strove for the same goals – greater justice, greater mercy, greater understanding for the idea of fraternity between men – but they wanted to strengthen the morale of their troops by proclaiming that every victory in battle ushering in a more enlightened, more just and more tolerant society was a final victory, a victory forever. This absolute unwillingness to acknowledge the possibility of spiritual and social regression, the optimistic confidence that everything humanity has gained from good and noble things can never be lost, can never disappear without developing into something even better always seemed to me to be the fundamental weakness of those who called themselves “free thinkers” – even when I considered myself a free thinker, albeit with many mental reservations.
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