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which could have opened any kind of academic career to
him, had been living in a kind of metaphysical mental universe,
in an invisible world apparently without any possible
link to the visible world of harsh political realities which
all the time demanded his full presence and ability to make
tough decisions.
In the Nordic countries the 1950s and 1960s were the period
when the long anti-metaphysical tradition, which since
the 1920s had gradually grown stronger, reached its climax.
The positivistic philosophy of Axel Hägerström, whom
Hammarskjöld met as a student in Uppsala, had a dominant
position. In 1960 Herbert Tingsten, in a book which was
generally met with a positive response, could proclaim the
death of all ideologies and the start of a new era of rationality,
where only the weight of the better arguments would be
decisive in political discourse. On the western side of the iron
curtain the process of secularisation had come to the edge of
securalism. On the eastern side atheism had already for decades
been the dominant public doctrine and continued to
be so until the collapse of the Soviet empire. I still remember
a visit to St Petersburg – then still Leningrad – in 1975,
where I discovered, much to my surprise, that the famous
Isak Cathedral had been turned into – in the dark basement
– a museum of all the horrors of church history, and then, as
the visitor ascended to the daylight of the first floor, a gallery
demonstrating all the impressive achievements of modern,
scientific atheism.
In the historic context where Vägmärken was first published,
it was inevitably met with scepticism, and considered some
sort of alien substance. Yet, to those who had followed the
development of Dag Hammarskjöld closely, there was no real
reason to be surprised by his affinity with Christian faith. In
a broadcast programme entitled ‘This I believe’ Hammarskjöld
had, at the time that he started his international career
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