[The following appeared in Reconsiderations 7:2 (December 2007).]
Todd A. P. Best
This fall our reading group focused on selected writings of Dorothy Sayers. As we read through a collection of her essays and one full book, it occurred to us that it couldn’t hurt to get even more people to read Dorothy Sayers. Our discussions were quite engaging, but for those who didn’t sit in on our reading group, we wanted to let you know that there’s still time to read this provocative author. But who was she, and why did we read her?
Dorothy Sayers was born in Oxford in 1893, the only daughter of a school headmaster. She received her first degree from Somerville College, Oxford in modern languages and later went on to be one of the first women to receive a degree from Oxford University, this one in medieval studies. Sayers decided that academic life did not suit her interests, so she worked in the publishing industry for several years. It was during this time, specifically in 1923, that she wrote her first novel, Whose Body?, in which she introduced a character named Lord Peter Whimsey, who would be the central character in her well-known series of detective novels and short stories.
Transitioning to full time writing, Sayers made a name for herself in the British literary scene. Her friends included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams, and though she is often associated with the famous Inkings, she never was actually a member. Later, she broadened her writing to include plays, essays, and translations of medieval classics like Dante’s Divine Comedy. In addition to print, stage and broadcasting would become staple forums for the presentation of Dorothy Sayers’ work.
Her historical context for thinking and writing was, of course, the war and an increasingly secular culture in Europe. In this sense, she wrote as an apologist for Christian theism in a culture and time that was having a hard time of being convinced of religion’s worth. With the onset of the war, she began writing prolifically, creating demand for her as a lecturer, and eventually leading her to become churchwarden for her parish in London.
It was after the war that Dorothy Sayers turned to translating medieval works. She translated The Song of Roland from the French and was working on the third volume of Dante when she suddenly died of heart failure at age 64 in December of 1957.
If one were to reduce Sayers’ work to one category, it could be called cultural theology. Topically, she wrote broadly – addressing issues ranging from work to worship, from creativity to creation, from human folly to human pleasure, and from the nature of economics to the nature of God. But through all this, there is always one anchor point for Sayers – a deep Christian understanding of whatever her topic happens to be, and she offers this understanding to whoever is interested, not just to the faithful. She writes with the voice of a cultural critic, a trained literary expert, someone who understands present historical significance in a way that transcends eras, and most importantly, she writes as an adept theologian.
For Sayers, theology is what shapes or ought to shape everything that Christians think about and everything that we do, and it also ought to speak meaningfully to the culture in addressing broadly human questions. She does this by setting forth, topic by topic, to show that Christian doctrine, the teaching of historically orthodox Christianity (also known as that demonized word “dogma”), is not, as many have said, restrictive or narrowing. Rather, it is expansive and opens us up to imaginatively exploring the vast implications that a particular doctrine might do for our toughest problems. Her line of thought often goes like this: here is a quandary, here is what the church has said in general through its basic creedal statements, and here are the implications of a theological response (often in contrast to an inadequate view that Christians themselves hold or to what the cultural perception might be).
One of the best examples of Sayers’ cultural application of theology is her book on aesthetics, The Mind of the Maker. In the book, Sayers’ offers her philosophy of the arts, specifically of the creative act that takes place in making art. Hers is a complex but very compelling understanding of how the trinity (three-in-one Godhead) provides a way for us to think about art and our own creativity. For a doctrine that causes so many to throw their hands up to the mysteriousness of it, Sayers thoughtfully puts it to work in ways that make it clear that even mystery can offer insight when probed and taken seriously.
As for her own theological place, Sayers’ was thoroughly Anglican, and though her thinking reaches across denominational differences in the same vein as Lewis’ concept of “mere Christianity,” it is frequently obvious that she takes as her reference point the Church of England. Ironically, this institutional context, whereby one actually knows the history and depth of one’s tradition, is what makes much of her writing so fresh and so rich. Being Anglican – and better yet, being historically Christian – for Sayers is to consider everything in reference to a theological understanding of the way things are, not as an endpoint but as a launching point. To put it another way, her method is to consider the historic doctrines of the church, to understand them, and to creatively put them to use in daily life and thought, though they have become stale to many. Thus Sayers’ legacy could be said to be that she shows us how to breathe life into doctrines; and she demonstrates that they are not, in fact, boring, but rather they are of the most dramatic of ideas when coupled with our creative imagination rooted in genuine human experience.
Forty years after her death, Dorothy Sayers’ body of work is both broad and deep. Her essays and non-fiction, in particular, give us ways to explore the historic Christian tradition as a framework for understanding culture and human experience. And though a creed may be centuries old, age alone does not allow us to dismiss a doctrinal statement’s possibility for providing a way of seeing as well as a place to stand – so long as the idea has the possibility of being true, and so long as the human imagination is allowed its creative energy to work out the implications.
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Todd A. P. Best is Editor of Reconsiderations and Director of Programs at the Christian Study Center.