(drama, 1943)
It has become commonplace in our time for the story of Jesus to be staged as a play, a film, or even a television miniseries, but when Dorothy L. Sayers first wrote The Man Born to Be King, it was actually against the law in Britain to represent any person of the Holy Trinity on the stage. Technically, since her plays were radio productions rather than stage productions, Sayers was within the law. Nevertheless, she stirred up controversy when The Man Born to Be King was first performed. Today we wouldn’t think twice about the propriety of such an undertaking, and many have indeed tried to capture the drama and spiritual depth of the Gospels through various mediums. But few, if any, have told their story as successfully as Sayers.
With these radio plays, Sayers was attempting to help modern listeners better understand and identify with the biblical text through making the characters within it more relatable as real people who lived in the real world—not stained glass figures or Sunday school flannel graph cutouts. She believed these biblical stories had become so commonplace and riddled with clichés that people had become dulled to their message and impact. By making her characters more complex, fully rounded, and believable as real human beings, by having them speak in understandable modern language, and by placing them in truly dramatic situations, Sayers hoped to make them come alive in a fresh way. And she wanted to do so as artfully as possible, not creating mere religious propaganda but rather a vivid, dramatic presentation.
Sayers achieved her goal through a respectful reworking of the biblical texts by exploring the interior motivations of characters such as Judas and Lazarus and by adding her poetic touch. These characteristics can be seen in a speech she puts in the mouth of Mary Magdalene. Speaking to Jesus, Mary says:
You were the only person there that was really alive. The rest of us were going about half-dead—making gestures of life. . . . The life was not in us but with you—intense and shining, like the sun when it rises and turns the flames of our candles to pale smoke. I felt the flame of the sun in my heart. When you spoke to me I came alive for the first time. And I love life all the more since I have learned its meaning.1
Forcefully and poetically, Sayers opens up these Bible stories by creating people we can identify with, and then she invites us to experience them with a renewed sense of their mystery, emotion, and spiritual depth.
Not everyone was happy with Sayers’s attempt to reinvigorate Jesus’s story through drama. When the radio plays were first performed on BBC radio, they set off a firestorm of criticism. Many listeners felt it was sacrilegious and improper to use modern language—much less contemporary slang—to retell the story of Jesus. They found it troubling that she had departed from the text of the Authorized Bible and taken liberties with story details. And they argued that the law prohibiting representation of any person of the Holy Trinity on the stage should also prohibit the presentation of sacred stories in any such down-to-earth manner.
Sayers dismissed these complaints as theologically naïve, as she desired to give her audience something richer than the typical “churchy” art they were used to. She scorned plays written as propaganda, with the primary purpose being evangelizing or edifying.
If one writes with his eye on the spiritual box-office, he will at once cease to be a dramatist, and decline into a manufacturer of propagandistic tracts. . . . He will lose his professional integrity, and with it all his power, including the power to preach the Gospel.2
The often lifeless and unconvincing work that passes for “Christian art” in our own time surely is evidence of the truth of her statement.
Sayers overcame these criticisms by creating a very successful cycle of twelve short plays that were undeniably powerful, both spiritually and artistically. The plays were later gathered together and published as a book. This volume had no less a fan than C. S. Lewis, who wrote to Sayers of his appreciation for it and told her he made a habit of rereading it every year during Holy Week. One cannot but be saddened that this dramatic cycle is largely forgotten, and might wistfully ponder the film that could be created using her drama as the shooting script.
The daughter of an Anglican rector, Dorothy L. Sayers was born in Oxford in 1893, and evidenced a precocious ability with languages from childhood. She was learning Latin by age seven, and eventually added French and German. Later in life she also mastered Italian so that she could read Dante’s Divine Comedy in its original language, and then translated it into English. An excellent student, Sayers won a scholarship to Oxford and became one of the first women to ever graduate from that school with a Master of Arts degree.
Her earliest published writing was poetry, but she made her reputation with a series of mystery novels featuring the eccentric aristocrat and amateur detective Lord Peter Wimsey, who solved crimes for his own amusement. The first Wimsey novel was Whose Body? (1922), and the series eventually included eleven novels and a number of short stories. Highlights include Unnatural Death (1927), Strong Poison (1930), in which he first meets Harriet Vane, whom he will court and eventually marry, Murder Must Advertise (1933), The Nine Tailors (1934), which revolves around bell-ringing and illustrates the care Sayers took in getting all the details just right, and Gaudy Night (1935), which takes place in Oxford and finally brings Wimsey and Vane together. The stories all revolve around puzzling mysteries, are rich in character-driven humor and social satire, and evidence an underlying morality.
By the 1940s Sayers seemed to tire of detective fiction, and she turned her attention to writing religious drama—including The Zeal of Thy House (1937), He That Should Come (1938), The Devil to Pay (1939), and The Emperor Constantine (1951)—as well as a number of influential essays on theology and apologetics, which were gathered together in collections such as The Mind of the Maker (1941), a remarkable study of the connection between creativity and the doctrine of the Trinity, Unpopular Opinions (1946), and Creed or Chaos? (1947). Her keen intelligence, combined with her sharp wit and abundant creativity, made her one of the most able defenders of traditional Christian orthodoxy in the twentieth century.
When Sayers surveyed the landscape of Christianity in her time, she found it intellectually shallow and spiritually stagnant. In contrast to those who thought the problem with the contemporary church was too much emphasis on doctrine and not enough on religious experience, Sayers believed that it was the doctrine—the dogma—that gave faith its substance and its relevance. In her important essay “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged,” she asserted that “the Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man—and the dogma is the drama.”3 Sayers feared that modern Christians had domesticated Jesus in order to make him more palatable to contemporary sensibilities, thereby blunting the very radical nature of what he said and did.
The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore—on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him “meek and mild,” and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.4
In The Man Born to Be King and other religious plays, Sayers wanted to present the Christian faith in all its scandalous confrontation with our tidy modern pieties. She saw her primary task, though, not as trying to figure out how to illustrate the Christian doctrines but as telling a good story—entertaining and coherent—and letting the theology emerge. As she reminded her readers, “God was executed by people painfully like us, in a society very similar to our own—in the over-ripeness of the most splendid and sophisticated Empire the world has ever seen.”5 If we fail to grasp the shocking reality of that truth, Sayers believed, we have failed to grasp what the story of Jesus is really all about.
A lifelong Anglican, Dorothy L. Sayers never felt drawn toward mysticism or religious enthusiasm. In her own words, she was “quite without the thing known as ‘inner light’ or ‘spiritual experience.’ ” For her, faith was more about understanding, and she possessed what she called “a passionate intellect.” When combined with her creative gifts, her intellect empowered her to communicate the teachings of Christianity in a way that challenged the cynics and skeptics and reminded believers of the faith delivered in the ancient creeds. Without this connection to its heritage, she believed, Christianity could easily descend into a psychologized secularism, subjectivity, and intellectual chaos. It would be fatal, she wrote, “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.”6 With her gifts, Dorothy L. Sayers could make these traditional teachings not only believable and intellectually respectable but also dramatically compelling.