Editing Vidkun Quisling (section)

==Religious and philosophical views {{anchor|Universism}}==
[[File:Quisling library.jpg|thumb|alt=A black and white image of a room with a wood panelled ceiling, with a large fireplace and bookshelves on two sides of the room. At the far end of the room is a glass fronted double door leading away. There are a number of small chairs and tables around the room.|Quisling's library included works of a number of eminent philosophers]]
Quisling was interested in science, eastern religions and metaphysics, eventually building up a library that included the works of [[Baruch Spinoza|Spinoza]], [[Immanuel Kant|Kant]], [[Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel|Hegel]] and [[Arthur Schopenhauer|Schopenhauer]]. He kept up with developments in the realm of [[quantum physics]], but did not keep up with more current philosophical ideas.<ref name="dahl8"/> He blended philosophy and science into what he called Universism, or Universalism, which was a unified explanation of everything. His original writings stretched to a claimed two thousand pages.<ref name="dahl8">{{harvnb|Dahl|1999|pp=8–9}}.</ref> He rejected the basic teachings of [[First Council of Nicaea|orthodox Christianity]] and established a new theory of life, which he called ''Universism'', a term borrowed from a textbook which [[Jan Jakob Maria de Groot]] had written on [[Chinese philosophy]]. De Groot's book argued that Taoism, Confucianism and Buddhism were all part of a world religion that De Groot called Universism. Quisling described how his philosophy "... followed from the universal [[theory of relativity]], of which the [[Special theory of relativity|specific]] and [[General theory of relativity|general theories of relativity]] are special instances."

His ''[[Masterpiece|magnum opus]]'' was 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 titled ''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.<ref name="dahl8"/>

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 on earth and justified his actions in those terms. During the first week of October, he wrote a fifty-page document titled ''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."<ref name="dahl410"/> The document was also notable for its attack on the [[materialism]] of Nazism. In addition, he simultaneously worked on a sermon, ''Eternal Justice'', which reiterated his key beliefs, including reincarnation.<ref name="dahl410">{{harvnb|Dahl|1999|pp=410–412}}.</ref>