Dorothy L. Sayers: apologist for her time – and ours?

Introduction

I discovered the work of Dorothy L. Sayers when I began my doctoral research – and not through the usual route. ¹ I had not read any of Sayers’ detective novels, although I saw the TV adaptations of the 1980s starring Edward Petherbridge and Harriet Walter. I began with Sayers’ essays, then with her plays, discovered her theology, and only then read the detective novels. I was caught by the vigour of Sayers’ writing, her intelligence, humour and irony, occasionally bordering on sarcasm, as she engaged with the issues of her day (she lived from 1893 to 1957), from the perspective of her commitment to the faith of the Christian creeds. In examining her work, we are looking into the context of the first half of the twentieth century, and not least at the effect of two World Wars on British society.

Novelist, playwright, theologian

Of those who know Sayers as a novelist, few today know that she also wrote plays. Fewer still are likely to have an acquaintance with Sayers’ essays, although some have been republished relatively recently. There was, for instance, a reissue of the long essay Mind of the Maker, with a foreword by Susan Howatch, in the 1990s; this was republished again in 2004, with the reissuing of some of her other essays also in 2004–05. These, together with newer published research in America and the continuation of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society testify to continuing interest.

Dorothy L. Sayers did not consider herself a theologian because she was not theologically trained, so not a ‘professional’ theologian. ² She famously refused the offer of a Lambeth doctorate of divinity because of this and because she did not think herself ‘worthy’ of it. ³ John Thurmer’s book of essays about her theological work is titled Reluctant Evangelist, ⁴ while Barbara Reynolds has a chapter in her biography of Sayers entitled ‘Reluctant prophet’. ⁵ She was a lay Anglican, of a High Church tradition, intelligent, well-read, interested, and a passionate and prolific commentator on Christian themes and on general issues from a Christian perspective. The title of her collection of essays, Creed or Chaos? And other essays in popular theology, ⁶ gives an indication of what she saw herself doing. Any reluctance was not about theology itself, but about the label of theologian.

One result of her own reluctance – or perhaps a result of other factors relating to professional theologians themselves – is that she has not been taken seriously as a theologian by many theologians or Christian leaders. A comparison with the different treatment afforded to her contemporary C. S. Lewis is instructive. In her time, as a layperson and as a woman, she would not have fitted into the box marked ‘theologian’. Her reluctance may also have been about wanting to keep the focus on what she saw as her primary vocation as a writer.

What of the label ‘apologist’? Sayers engaged with the issues and debates of her own time and gave reasoned arguments for the Christian faith in a context of controversy, something that is at the heart of the apologetic task. That task is both outward-facing (to society and cultures) and inward-facing (to the Church, including critique).

Her essays range in tone for varied audiences, from the scholarly and philosophical, for example when interpreting political changes in history in Begin Here, ⁷ to addresses for broadcasting such as ‘Living to work’, which explored a Christian theology of vocation. She could write with amusement (‘The Gulf Stream and the Channel’, exploring the peculiarities of the British) or in the much more angry vein of ‘The English language’ or ‘They tried to be good’. These essays are all in the collection Unpopular Opinions, ⁸ published in 1946. That title itself signals that Sayers was both interested in and critical of ‘popular opinion’ and expected her own opinions to be ‘unpopular’. Sayers was an interdisciplinary writer, and interdisciplinarity is often not popular, opening one up to being critiqued from everywhere.

Writing theologically

If one considers Sayers’ novels, she might not easily be labelled a Christian theologian or apologist. In fact, she protested strongly against the idea that her most famous character, Lord Peter Wimsey, might become a Christian. ⁹ However, if one delves into the plays and essays, her passionate Christian convictions are clear, especially her strong presentation of the case for traditional Christian doctrine, as well as an exploration of the life of Christ. The title of one of her essays, ‘The dogma is the drama’, expresses her sense of the drama and excitement of Christian teaching.

Sayers’ emphasis on the doctrine of the Church’s creeds was not necessarily popular at the time. She noted that, amidst plenty of talk about church matters, it was often difficult to get people to talk and think about doctrine – something that would be even more true today. Later twentieth-century questions about authority and authoritarianism contributed further to a greater suspicion of creeds and dogma, but in a way of which Sayers herself would be highly suspicious, since her arguments were often that people did not sufficiently understand the traditional teaching of the Church. For Sayers, religion and doctrine could not be separated. This might be an argument that in our day can be expressed as a conviction that ‘spirituality’ (that still popular word) and doctrine cannot be separated – and, where they are, it is not that doctrine is absent, merely that it is unspoken or (potentially dangerously) unconscious and unexplored.

Sayers’ theological interests focused on the Incarnation and Trinity, doctrines that were at the heart of Christian controversy and exploration during the first centuries of the Church’s life. In Mind of the Maker, which was ‘dashed off’ along with other things in 1941, Sayers explored the image of God as Creator, or Creative Mind, using the analogy of the human creative artist. In Trinitarian terms, she worked out the ‘Creative Mind’ as ‘Idea, Energy, Power’. ¹⁰ The creative mind is also the image of God in humanity; it is what links us to God and also what makes life worth living. Here is the theology of Sayers’ own position as a creative artist and the relationship of her faith to her work. For Sayers, human art, craft and work were all to be seen as creative responses to God the Creator. The intertwining of these modes is again significant in today’s contexts.

Was she only repeating the creeds? In one sense, certainly, yes. She was, though, not simply repeating but re-presenting, so that those who did not know anything about Christian doctrine could better understand it. Apologetics is a discipline of re-presentation, especially as directed towards audiences beyond the Church. Apologetics is also a creative theological task, precisely because of the necessity for new forms of expression. I would argue that there is a continuum rather than a clear line between restatement and reformulation, and that the boundaries between evangelism, apologetics and theology are not clear-cut. Today’s contexts in Britain – different even from what Sayers could assume in the early part of the twentieth century – are still less conversant with Christian claims, and they demand that the practices of evangelism, apologetics and theological reflection, rooted in past traditions and always involved in translation into new contexts, are held together.

Sayers’ religious drama was part of her campaign against the dullness and Pharisaism (her term) that were perceived by many as being the very essence of the Christian religion, but which she located in mistaken ideas of Christianity. ¹¹ We might say that her drama was her sphere of evangelism, although she emphasized that it must first be good drama. She wrote in conscious contrast to the kind of religious drama in which ‘at the name of Jesus, every voice goes plummy, every gesture becomes pontifical and a fearful creeping paralysis slows down the pace of the dialogue’. ¹² Her religious plays demonstrated her claim that dogma and drama can and should be intimately connected. The Zeal of thy House (1937) took the theology of work as its theme; The Just Vengeance (1946) was described by Sayers herself in the introduction as ‘a miracle play of Man’s insufficiency and God’s redemptive act, set against the background of contemporary crisis’. ¹³ The Emperor Constantine (1951) was a drama about the theologically crucial Council of Nicaea. But Sayers explored these themes through dramatic situations, through character development, by telling people’s stories.

In The Man Born to Be King, her cycle of 12 radio plays on the life of Christ that was first broadcast in 1941, she translated the Christian story into the language and thought forms of the time. ¹⁴ The ‘language of the time’ was a key concern for her, which meant crucially – and controversially – that the characters did not speak the language of the Authorized Version. These plays are an example not just of her care about the doctrine of the Incarnation, but of her concern with expression. That, too, is a theological concern for followers of the ‘Word made flesh’. The question of appropriate language and appropriate expression remains a central one for every age. It is the issue at the heart of whether we are talking about repetition or reformulation. Sayers, herself an accomplished linguist and in her later years once again a translator, would have known that there is no simple repetition involved in translation.

Sayers also wrote about the realities and traditions of Christian morality. In this she was based firmly in what she understood of both Bible and tradition. She contended that the Christian Church remained extremely uncomfortable with the biblical picture of Jesus when it came to morality: ‘Disreputable people who knew they were disreputable were gently told to “go and sin no more”; the really unparliamentary language was reserved for those thrifty, respectable, and Sabbatarian citizens who enjoyed Caesar’s approval and their own.’ ¹⁵ Her command of the scathing ironic tone was lavished on the fact that the Church seemed to give the impression that the only ‘immorality’ is sexual. To contradict this impression, she delivered the talk ‘The other six deadly sins’ (in Creed or Chaos?), which is still worth exploring today for similar reasons to those Sayers identified in the 1930s and 1940s.

Sayers insisted, however, that Christianity was not reducible to moral principles. Christian morals grow out of Christian dogma and rest on the authority of Christ, which is itself a dogma. Doctrine is necessary and inevitable ‘if Christianity is to be anything more than a little mild wishful thinking about ethical behaviour’. ¹⁶ At this point in her argument (remembering that she was developing many of these claims in the context of the Second World War), the doctrine most particularly applicable for Sayers was that of the reality of sin and evil. Her most scathing satire was of ‘Progressive Humanism’, which ‘had been proclaiming for years that nobody ever wants to be naughty. There were no sinful men; indeed there was no sin.’ ¹⁷

In many essays, Sayers reflected on the experience of wartime, on why the war had started and on hopes for its aftermath – the arena of politics, we might say. War, for her, forced people to question their most basic principles and beliefs, and this should provide room for theology and opportunity for the Church, as long as the fundamental question could be shown to be ‘What do we believe?’, as she argued. In one sense, Sayers was engaged in prophetic comment on her society, and on the Church, in the light of Christian faith. Sayers’ work was a prophetic bridge between the Church and the society beyond the Church, dependent on a deeper understanding of Christianity, in the face of new questions, seeking possible answers about the shape and direction of society. It is astonishing how fresh and relevant some of her arguments still sound – about the economic systems that lead to war, and about the folly and greed of destroying the environment, for example. This freshness only reveals that there is much similar prophetic work still to be done by Christian people nearly 70 years later.

Apologist – for her time, and ours?

A recent interpreter of Sayers, Laura Simmons, is cautious about ‘co-opting’ Sayers for our own concerns, given that Sayers resisted being co-opted by the Churches of her own day. ¹⁸ Simmons suggests that reading Sayers and learning from her work is not to take her as an authority on all subjects. I prefer the notion of looking for methodological hints for our own theological work. Sayers was of her time; the controversies she dealt with are not ours. As an example, her writings about women’s position in society still have significant, sharp questions for today, but she thought feminism had gone far enough and certainly did not like that label being used to describe herself. A vigorous argument that women be treated as fully human and as individuals is certainly still needed, but discrimination and abuse take forms today of which she would have had little experience, and ‘feminism’ as a word and a movement has had a long and difficult history beyond what she thought might have been its end.

We can learn, though, from Sayers’ spirit of engagement and her vigour; she was prepared for controversy, quick to ask questions and test out others’ ideas, particularly those that might be labelled ‘popular opinion’. She was interested and well read in many disciplines. Mind of the Maker depends as much on texts about science (of the 1920s and 1930s) as on those interpreting Christian doctrine. But her work depends on reading a range of texts through her rooting in human experience in a particular time and place. It is that interweaving of in-depth reflection on social issues with a range of resources from Christian traditions that might make the labels of contextual or practical theology appropriate for her, although they are today’s labels rather than hers.

Sayers was rooted in Christian traditions, although she would have used the singular ‘tradition’ in a way I cannot. She was adamant that the Christian doctrines some regarded as unsuitable for the modern age needed to be understood and appropriated afresh. I want to hear her claim, not because I would necessarily want to use Christian traditions and doctrines in exactly the same way she did, but because their weight is not sufficiently understood or noted today, in church or in society more broadly. I would argue that when Christian traditions are examined, situated in their contexts and explored again in the language and thought forms of our own contexts, they will be re-expressed – and, yes, also challenged – in ways that can never simply be repetition. Every theological exploration and discussion offers something new, to be evaluated in conversation and community (and in academic debate). But that can best be done through careful attention to the theological moves of previous eras, in interpreting not just Christian texts of the past but also Christian experiences and worship and scholarship as they engaged with the new times and new issues of each ‘present day’.

Sayers’ concern with the importance of artistic forms is also instructive for us. She wanted creative work to be seen as a vehicle of theological expression and also examined theologically. She drew attention to many forms of creative expression, and we too should pay attention to novels, films, plays, music, painting – to creative activity itself – and to how they are received. With that comes the notion of expression through analogy and metaphor, through imagination and image, of ‘saying’ and ‘hearing’ things differently. As a professional writer, Sayers wrote in many different artistic forms, and different audiences would be likely to have responded to her novels, or her plays, or her poetic translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. Her clear interest in varied human experience was born of a breadth of vision of which we seem shy today. The inward-looking, survival focus of so much church attention mitigates against the breadth of engagement that we need if the world is to hear more of Christian witness and Christian truth claims.

To describe Dorothy L. Sayers as an apologist begs questions about that term itself. Some have argued that it is an outmoded term; others have argued for a ‘new apologetics’. The term has been more and less popular over recent decades. There is still a need for a range of ways of addressing and engaging the world around us, in the name of Christian faith – and for a range of people doing that. Apologetics takes clarity of expression and a range and depth of exploration. But it is far from simply intellectual activity: in Apologetics Without Apology, Elaine Graham writes in her introduction:

I will argue, then, for a Christian apologetics framed less around the criteria of rational, evidentialist argument, so much as something that witnesses, in deed and word, to the wider canvass of an entire lifestyle. It narrates and renders transparent an entire worldview of loyalties, affections – and, most significantly, everyday practices. ¹⁹

Dorothy L. Sayers’ writing is time-bound and culture-bound, and that is one very good reason for looking at her work. It reminds us that theological work, particularly that which we might term apologetics, has to be partial, limited and contextual, and therefore approached with humility. It is undertaken in relation to particular aspects of particular cultures. Sayers herself was often a polemicist and humility is not easy in the mode of polemic, or even biting irony. But to say that is to look at only some of her work. There is careful argument; much is humorous – and perhaps the humour that gets through often has an edge to it. Francis Spufford’s Unapologetic is an example from recent years of a defence of Christian faith with an edge to its humour. ²⁰ Christian theology and the Church’s work of apologetics need interpreters, especially those skilled in language and many forms of cross-cultural communication. Sayers is one of those and is still worth attention. But all Christians need to be equipped for this too, in their own way and to the greatest extent possible.

In an age of Brexit, when there is a need to debate values and beliefs, and amid continuing controversies about gender and sexuality, there are still things to learn from Sayers. Drawing on Christian traditions and wisdom, as well as focusing on the realities of contemporary events and values, and establishing a conversation between the two are at the heart of all theological endeavour. Perhaps we could do with risking controversy more often, from a place of engaged intelligent reasoning and creativity, and with humour.