More on Dorothy L Sayers - A Christian Humanist for Today
Mark T
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Dorothy Leigh Sayers was born at Oxford on 13th June 1893, the only child of
the Rev. Henry Sayers, of Anglo-Irish descent. Her father was at the time
headmaster of Christ Church Cathedral School, and she was born in the
headmaster's house. She was brought up at Bluntisham Rectory,
Cambridgeshire, and went to the Godolphin School, Salisbury, where she won a
scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford. In 1915 she graduated with first
class honours in modern languages. Disliking the routine and seclusion of
academic life she joined Blackwell's, the Oxford publishers, worked with her
Oxford friend Eric Whelpton at L'École des Roches in Normandy, and from 1922
until 1931 served as copywriter at the London advertising firm of Bensons.
In 1923 she published her first novel, Whose Body, which introduced Lord
Peter Wimsey, her hero for fourteen volumes of novels and short stories. She
also wrote four other novels in collaboration and two serial stories for
broadcasting. Writing full time she rose to be the doyen of crime writers
and in due course president of the Detection Club. Her work, carefully
researched and widely varied, included poetry, the editing of collections
with her erudite introductions on the genre, and the translating of the
Tristan of Thomas from mediaeval French. She admired E C Bentley and G K
Chesterton and numbered among her friends T S Eliot, Charles Williams and C
S Lewis.
She married Arthur Fleming in 1926. In 1928 her father died at Christchurch
in the Fens, his last parish, and she bought a cottage at Witham, Essex, to
accommodate her mother. On the latter's death a year later she moved in
herself and bought the house next door, No 22 Newland Street, to throw the
two houses into one. There she worked until her death in 1957.
Gaudy Night was to be the culmination of the Wimsey saga, but her friend
Muriel St Clare Byrne persuaded her to collaborate in putting Lord Peter on
the stage in Busman's Honeymoon. The play was successfully launched in
December 1936, and she gave up crime writing except for the book of the play
and three short stories. With her new financial security she turned
thankfully to the work for which she had been trained.
The stage fascinated her. She had already been asked to write a play, The
Zeal of Thy House, for the Canturbury Festival. She followed this with six
more, up to the Colchester Festival play, The Emperor Constantine in 1951.
The most momentous was The Man Born to be King, written for broadcasting in
children's hour at the request of the BBC. Her presentation of Christ's
voice speaking modern English raised a storm of protest and revolutionised
religious play-writing. Opposition stimulated her. She would never
compromise where her art was concerned.
Her theology was traditionally Anglican with emphasis on doctrine. Every
available moment of her time was spent writing, to the small hours of the
morning. Letters, articles and essays streamed from her pen. The war led her
to write Begin Here, followed by The Mind of the Maker, in which she
compares the human with the Divine creator. She explored by-ways of
knowledge, delighted in puzzles and enjoyed many a fight which she conducted
with wit and good humour. Her formidable presence, magnificent brain and
logical presentation put her in great demand as a lecturer. She worked with
the Rev. Patrick McLaughlin at the St Anne's centre for Christian discourse
and became in 1952 churchwarden of her London parish, St Thomas-cum-St
Annes.
She found her culminating role after the war. Dante's writings had long
intrigued her. Now she taught herself old Italian and made a translation in
terza rima of The Divine Comedy unmatched for its popularity and the clarity
of its notes. She also found time to finish her translation of the Song of
Roland from the old French. But she unexpectedly died from heart failure on
17 December 1957 while engaged on Dante's third volume, Paradiso, and her
friend Dr Barbara Reynolds completed her work. To the end she drove herself
hard, living the philosophy she expressed in these words:
"The only Christian work is good work, well done"
From http://www.sayers.org.uk/
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[Various works]
....
1937 the Zeal of Thy House. Canterbury Cathedral commissioned a play each
year to be performed at the cathedral. (T S Eliot's Murder In the Cathedral,
a play about the martyrdom of Thomas a Becket, had been a play in this
series.) Miss Sayers wrote two plays for Canterbury. The Zeal of Thy House
deals with the architect who rebuilt the central portion (the choir) of
Canterbury Cathedral after the fire of 1176. The play deals with pride of
workmanship, pride of possession, the creative imagination, the nature of
the creative act, the doctrine of the Incarnation, and the doctrine of the
Trinity. For a non-fictional discussion of the Trinity, see her book The
Mind of the Maker, listed below.
1939 the Devil To Pay is Miss Sayer's second Canterbury play. It retells the
story of Doctor Faustus, who sold his soul to the devil, and how God dealt
with him at the last. The moral is: evil cannot be undone, but only purged
and redeemed.
....
1940 He That Should Come. This is a Nativity play, originally for radio
production, although it has been adapted for the stage. While most Nativity
plays take what may be called a devotional approach, Sayers gives us the
story of the birth of Jesus in (except for a prologue and and epilogue) a
straightforwardly naturalistic setting, in the bustle of a crowded inn,
where most of those present have no idea that anything particularly
significant is going on.
1942 the Man Born To Be King. After the success of He That Should Come, the
Bbc invited Miss Sayers to write a series of twelve radio plays on the life
of Jesus. She did so, and roused some protests from those who thought it
irreverent to make Biblical characters speak ordinary (as opposed to King
James) English, and in general behave like real people. She replies that her
point is precisely that the Incarnation really happened -- that God took
human nature upon him, and lived as a real man surrounded by real people who
spoke the ordinary language of their day. Each of the twelve plays is
preceded by Sayers' comments, often dealing with the historical background
of the incidents, and the theological issues raised by them. These are, in
my judgement, outstandingly insightful and thought-provoking.
1946 the Just Vengeance: This play was commissioned for the 750th
anniversary of Lichfield Cathedral. It is a play about the Atonement, not in
the sense of being a Passion Play, but in that it discusses the theology of
the Atonement, borrowing heavily from the ideas of Dante.
...
1941 the Mind of the Maker. In this seminal work, Sayers discusses the
psychology of the creative mind at work in producing a novel or sculpture or
other work, as an aid to understanding the theological doctrine of the
Trinity, and the latter as an aid to understanding the former. For a brief,
inadequate, summary of her thesis, send the three-word message Get Trinity
Analogies to the address LIST...@ASU.EDU. But it is better to read the book
itself.
...
1947 Creed Or Chaos. a collection of essays.
1948 the Lost Tools of Learning (pamphlet). Here Sayers schools are failing
to teach students how to think clearly, and how to go about learning
something. She recommends a program, based loosely on the curriculum of the
medieval university.
1954 Introductory Papers On Dante. The title explains the contents. I add
only that they are marvelous papers, a superb exposition of Dante as poet,
theologian, and lover, by a first-rate scholar who knows what she is talking
about.
1957 Further Papers On Dante. More of the same.
....
1987 the Whimsical Christian. This is a collection (made after her death) of
18 of her essays, mostly reprinted from earlier collections. It was earlier
published as Christian Letters To a Post-christian World. ...
a.. "Selections from the Pantheon Papers." A parody written for Punch.
"The Greatest Drama Ever Staged." On the Incarnation. "Strong Meat."
b.. "The Dogma is the Drama." Most non-Christians, and most Christians, do
not realize how exciting the official Christian creed really is. "What Do We
Believe?" "Creed or Chaos?"
c.. "A Vote of Thanks to Cyrus." Sayers remembers realizing as a child
that the Cyrus mentioned in the Bible is the same Cyrus found in her history
books, and that the Bible is about things that actually happened in this
world, not a tale off in some other dimension. (Along the same lines, a
teacher in the New York schools reports the electric effect on his students
when he was telling them how the early American settlers sailed across the
Atlantic, and then pointed out to them that the Atlantic was the same body
of salt water that they could see from the harbor a short distance away. It
had never occurred to most of them that there was any connection between
their history books and reality.)
d.. "The Dates in The Red-headed League." This is one of many essays, in a
tradition begun by Ronald Knox, analyzing the Sherlock Holmes stories using
the techniques applied by many scholars to the analysis of the Scriptures.
"Toward a Christian Esthetic." "Creative Mind." "The Image of God." "Problem
Picture." "Christian Morality."
e.. "The Other Six Deadly Sins." The traditional list of Seven Capital
Sins, reading from most serious to least seriousi is: Pride, Envy, Anger,
Sloth, Avarice, Glutton, and Lust. However, many persons have gotten the
impression that the Church is concerned only with the last of these. Sayers
undertakes to remind her readers of the other six.
f.. "Dante and Charles Williams." Charles Williams, poet, novelist,
critic, historian, theologian, and mystic of the Affirmative Way, first got
Sayers interested in Dante. She here writes about Williams's interpretation
of Dante. "The Writing and Reading of Allegory." "Oedipus Simplex: Freedom
and Fate in Folklore and Fiction."
g.. "The Faust Legend and the Idea of the Devil."
Translations:
...
a.. 1949, 1957, 1962 The (Divine) Comedy Of Dante Alighieri. This
translation from the Italian of one of the world's greatest works of
literature and of theology is far and away my favorite English version of
Dante. Even those who prefer another translation (or who read the poem in
Italian) will find the notes invaluable. For details, see the biographical
sketch of Dante, listed around mid-September.
Dorothy L Sayers died 17 December 1957 (Encyclopedia Americana) or perhaps
the next day (Who Was Who), leaving her translation of the Comedy
unfinished. The last thirteen cantos and the notes and commentary to the
Paradiso were supplied by her friend and fellow scholar, Dr. Barbara
Reynolds.
...
From http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bio/19.html
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Dorothy L. Sayers: A Christian Humanist for Today
by Mary Brian Durkin
Sister Durkin is associate professor of English at Rosary College, River
Forest, Illinois. This article appeared in the Christian Century, November
14, 1979, p. 1114. Copyright by the Christian Century Foundation and used by
permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at
www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by
Ted & Winnie Brock.
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During her lifetime, Dorothy L. Sayers was known to many readers as the
creator of that debonair, aristocratic sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey, who solved
the mysteries in Murder Must Advertise, Gaudy Night and The Nine Tailors. To
others, she was the dramatist whose radio serial, The Man Born to Be King,
brought the words of Christ into their living rooms. To countless students,
she was the scholar and translator who made Dante's Divine Comedy not only
readable but enjoyable, and surprisingly relevant to their own era. At the
time of her death in 1957, Sayers's writings, aside from her best novels and
short stories, were not well known outside England, but in the past ten
years, particularly in the United States, her reputation as a Christian
humanist has grown steadily.
....
A devout Anglican, Sayers viewed all life in terms of the incarnation. She
lectured and wrote on the imperative need to make Christian dogma meaningful
in ordinary life. In Begin Here, a wartime essay on aspects of peace, she
defines freedom as it was understood in medieval England: "Freedom . . . not
in the sense we are inclined to give the word today -- that is, exemption
from all external restrictions -- but in a more philosophical sense: the
freedom to be true to man's real nature, that is, to stand in the right
relationship to God." This relationship, she insists, can be achieved only
when one in daily life manifests Christlike love for others, a way of life
based not on sentimental chatter about brotherly, sisterly love, but on a
disciplined integrity toward oneself and others. In the essay "Creed or
Chaos," she stresses that it is fatal to allow people to "suppose that
Christianity is only a mode of feeling . . . [it is] hopeless to offer
Christianity as a vague, idealistic aspiration: it is a hard, tough,
exacting, and complex doctrine steeped in drastic and uncompromising
realism."
Right Relationships
Only in recent years have Sayers's readers become aware that many of the
Christian truths and ideals expressed forthrightly in her essays are subtly
woven into most of her writings: poetry, drama, Dantean studies and even
fiction. The idea of maintaining right relationships with God, one's
neighbor and oneself is an important theme, for instance, in her third
novel, Unnatural Death (1927).
....
Valuing Integrity
In the novel Gaudy Night (1935) the theme of integrity is doubly
significant, affecting the Wimsey-Vane romance and the plot.
....
The Ethics of Advertising
The integrity of work is a prominent theme in many of Sayers's writings. In
the essay "Why Work?" she speaks out against wastefulness and against
"advertisements imploring and exhorting and cajoling and menacing and
bullying us to glut ourselves with things we do not want, in the name of
snobbery and idleness and sex-appeal." Again she stresses the need of
proportion and right relationships. Work, she says, is not what one does to
live, but the thing one lives to do. "It is, or should be, the full
expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual,
mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself
to God." She continues:
We should ask of an enterprise, not "will it pay?" but "is it good?"; of a
man, not "what does he make?' but "what is his work worth?"; of goods, not
"can we induce people to buy them?" but "are they useful things well made?";
of employment, not "how much a week?" but "will it exercise my faculties to
the utmost?"
....
Sayers criticizes advertisers who tempt the gullible and invade areas that
should be private, but she also censures consumers who, indifferent to
blatantly offensive advertisements and shoddy, unnecessary products that
flood the market, nevertheless continue to spend foolishly. She also
concedes that advertisers know how to use the English language, choosing the
right, the "telling" word, a trait infrequently practiced by many who
carelessly misuse "the richest, noblest, most flexible and sensitive
language ever written or spoken."
....
The Church's Failures
Each of the essays in Creed or Chaos (1949) suggests the need for integrity
in the living of Christian ideals in all facets of life. Even the church,
Sayers suggests, has failed in this aim at times. In "The Other Six Deadly
Sins," she declares that though the church officially recognizes seven
capital sins, nevertheless it has seemed more concerned in the past to
condemn lust than it has the other capital offenses; quicker to condemn
sexual immorality than financial chicanery; more vigilant to condemn
sexually suggestive books or dramas than to suppress works suggesting that
wealth and position are the worthwhile goals of life; more harsh on
excessive drinkers than on those who charge excessive rates of interest
Commenting that in these matters the church's record is not as perfect as it
should be, she adds that by the church she does not mean Rome, Westminster,
or bishops, vicars or church wardens: "The Church is you and I. And are you
and I in the least sincere in our pretense that we disapprove of
Covetousness?"
Sayers does blame the church of the past several centuries for attempting to
uphold a particular standard of ethical values which derive from Christian
dogma while gradually dispensing with the very dogmas which are the sole
rational foundation for these values. The root cause of the Christian church's
failure to influence the lives of many today is, she insists, not that too
much stress has been placed on dogma but that it has been neglected or
watered down. Scorning a Christianity that fosters a mild "gentle Jesus
sentimentality" with vaguely humanistic ethics, she asserts boldly: "We
cannot blink the fact that gentle Jesus, meek and mild, was so stiff in His
opinions and so inflammatory in His language, that He was thrown out of
church, stoned, hunted from place to place, and finally gibbetted as a
firebrand and a public danger." Later generations muffled up that
challenging personality: "We have very efficiently pared the claws of the
Lion of Judah," turning Jesus "into a household pet for pale curates and
pious old ladies."
The Sin of Pride
The root of every sin against integrity -- that is, every sin against
humanity, against nature and against God -- is pride, the destroyer of
right, balanced relationships. Sayers's first drama, The Zeal of Thy House,
written for the Canterbury Festival, 1937, is an exploration of the theme of
pride. In the two previous years, the festival plays had concerned
well-known figures: Thomas à Becket in T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral
and Thomas Cranmer in Charles Williams's Thomas Cranmer of Canterbury. But
Sayers chose the obscure French architect William of Sens, commissioned in
1147 to rebuild the burnt-out choir of the cathedral. He is so proud of this
honor and so confident of his artistry that he asserts: "This Church is
mine, And none but I, not even God, can build it." Later he boasts:
We are the master craftsmen, God and I --
We understand each other. . . .
He knows that I am indispensable
To His work here; and for the work's sake, He,
Cherishing, as good masons do, His tools,
Will keep me safer
But just as William places the keystone of the great arch in its place, he
slips from the high scaffold and, like Ibsen's master builder, plummets to
earth.
During months of painful recuperation, William attempts to continue
overseeing the building operations, enduring physical pain with equanimity
but complaining vehemently when his orders are imperfectly executed or
changed by subordinates. He vows that he will never give up his creation for
others to finish, until in a dream, Michael the Archangel convinces him that
his sufferings and those of Christ are similar; Christ made the supreme
sacrifice: he left his work for others to finish. In his final submission,
William acknowledges:
O, I have sinned. The eldest sin of all,
Pride, that struck down the morning star from Heaven
Hath struck down me from where I sat and shone
Smiling on my new world.
He begs that his work remain unspoiled:
But let my work, all that was good in me,
All that was God, stand up and live and grow.
The work is sound, Lord God, no rottenness there -
Only in me.
The final speech in The Zeal of Thy House states a fundamental belief
frequently found in Sayers's writings: human handiwork reflects the
creativity of the Holy Trinity. Michael the Archangel addresses the
audience:
Children of men, lift up your hearts. . . .
Praise Him that He hath made man in His own image,
a maker
And craftsman like Himself, a little mirror of His
Triune Majesty.
For every work of creation is threefold, an earthly
Trinity
to match the heavenly.
The Playwright as Theologian
Although Sayers played a significant role in the Christian drama movement
that flourished in England in the '30s, she scorned plays written to edify
or to evangelize. In "Playwrights Are Not Evangelists," she warns the
writer: "If he writes with his eye on the spiritual box-office, he will at
once cease to be a dramatist, and decline into a manufacturer of
propagandist tracts. . . . He will lose his professional integrity, and with
it all his power, including his power to preach the Gospel." In the
introduction to The Man Born to Be King, she states: "A loose and
sentimental theology begets loose and sentimental art-forms; an illogical
theology lands one in illogical situations; an ill-balanced theology issues
in false emphasis and absurdity. Conversely: there is no more searching test
of a theology than to submit it to dramatic handling."
This radio serial was also to be a test of her own integrity. Aiming to
present the life of Christ as an actual historical event in first century
Palestine, she portrayed him as a human being who spoke in the vernacular,
as did the other biblical figures. If he did not use colloquial language, he
would be "a stained-glass, unreal figure." A storm of controversy and
censure broke. Vehement protests were directed against the use of the
vernacular and the representation of the voice of Christ. At that time and
up to 1968, the stage impersonation of any divine person was legally
forbidden in England except in the case of dramas presented in church.
Although the prohibition did not apply to radio presentations, some church
groups took full-page ads in newspapers to register their protests.
...
From http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1267
