[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]

TO THE REV. NEVILLE GORTON1

24 September 1941

Dear Mr. Gorton,

Many thanks for your letter and your two very interesting memoranda. I don’t know that I can do anything very direct to help on the good work – frankly, this “religious” business is already taking up so much time and energy in the way of making speeches, writing letters, and attending conferences that I am seriously hampered in my proper job of writing books and prevented from earning my living. But I will bear your activities in mind when a proper context occurs for making use of them.

As to your main point: I am well aware of the astonishing lack of any good theological literature for the layman. I am continually being asked for “a book which will tell me what Christian dogma is” – and, surprisingly enough, when one thinks of the British Museum shelves bending under the weight of theological volumes, I am obliged to say that there is no such thing. Everything one can think of is either (1) devotional (2) apologetic or (3) liturgical-ecclesiastical; moreover, one cannot seem to get the whole doctrine in one book, but only separate works on Christology, or Creation-doctrine, or the Trinity, or Sacraments or what not. I keep on complaining about this.

I believe that Messrs. Methuen are seriously interested in doing something along the lines you indicate for the use of Upper Forms, and that R. A. Edwards2 is a leading spirit in the venture. If you are not already in touch with him about it, it might be worth while to get on to him, or to Mr. E. V. Rieu3 of Methuen’s, who is dealing with the scheme. Of course, all publication is very difficult at the moment, owing to labour, paper, and pasteboard shortage.

As regards agreement about doctrine. I think it would be well if those who can agree on a basis should make a public statement4 about it. I mean, about doctrine, and not about “religion” or “Christian ethics”. Judging by my own experience in the last year or so, the “Christian” laity (and indeed the clerisy also) arc quite plainly and simply divided into two camps:

1. Those who believe that Jesus is fully God.

2. Those who do not, but hold Him to be a teacher of ethics, “divine” only in a Unitarian, Arian, or Adoptionist5 sense.

Between these two groups it seems almost impossible to patch up any real common platform, since the surface agreement will crack the moment any pressure is applied. As one correspondent has put it, the word “Christian” with its “implied theology” is [not] really applicable to Group Two, who might better be called “Jesuists”.

In my own popular talks and pamphlets I have settled down to a line which seems reasonably satisfactory in practice. I make no attempt to conciliate the “Jesuists”, but stick to what may be roughly called an “oecumenical and Catholic” interpretation of the Creeds. That is, I try to offer a doctrine that would be acceptable to the three “Catholic” branches of the Church: Roman, Greek-Orthodox, and Anglican. Differences of doctrine between these bodies I try not to discuss at all. considering that if the average ignorant reader or listener can get as far as grasping the main outlines of Christian doctrine common to those three communions, he will then be in a position to hammer out the details for himself. In practice, as I say, this kind of thing appears to be well received, not only by the bodies in question, but also by a great number of people in the Free Churches.

As far as the intelligent but uninstructed laity are concerned, I find they complain of vagueness in all the manifestoes, schemes, syllabuses, and suggestions put forward about “religious education”. A personal friend of my own,6 who has had to do with school and university education all her life, said to me the other day (à propos of the recent correspondence in The Times): “What I want to know, and what nobody tells me, is this: What do you suggest that children should be taught? Is there any ascertainable set of Christian dogmas that they could be instructed in? Can you formulate anything definite beyond ‘Bible history’ and ‘Christian morals’?” I replied in the sense of the preceding paragraph, saying that I proposed (or should propose if asked) that children should be taught (in addition, of course, to the actual New Testament text) the dogmas contained or implied in the Nicene Creed, and should be made to understand that this was, in fact, the corpus of Christian theology, so that when they became adult, they could accept or reject it, but not until they had learnt what it actually was. She replied that this proposal satisfied her perfectly; but added that, although brought up as a “Christian” she had never had the Creed expounded to her, did not know what its clauses implied, and had never heard from any pulpit a unified exposition of Christian doctrine as a coherent philosophy. She said further that the haphazard and unconvincing way in which Christianity was commonly set forth in pulpits seemed to her completely contemptible, and the sort of thing that would not be countenanced in any secular lecture-room.

She may be an exaggerated case; even so, it seems surprising and regrettable that a well-educated woman of forty-five, whose work has been chiefly concerned with English literature (so strongly influenced by Christian thought) should have grown up so wholly unaware of the Creeds, or of the general structure of Christian philosophy.

One great trouble, as you say, is the late-nineteenth-century-science outlook. I have come to the conclusion that the majority of people who are in a position to influence the organisation of “Christian education” are middle-aged or elderly people out of touch with youth. A master at one of our greatest public schools7 writes to me of his young men: “Christian ethics without dogma leaves them, I am glad to say, stone-cold; but they will take dogma with both hands and ask for more”. But the influential people who write to The Times are still saying, “Youth does not want dogma; it just wants the spirit of love”. Which isn’t true; and in any case, how the blazes do they propose to embody the spirit of love in a school syllabus? It is useless to go on saying that general uplift and nice religious feeling plus science will draw the world together in concord – we’ve tried that for a couple of centuries, and just look at the world!

I know next to nothing about the present position in State-aided schools, except that it seems to satisfy nobody. But it seems clear to me that, in schools generally speaking, there can be no intelligent teaching of Christian doctrine unless the subject is taken seriously and taught either by

(a) members of the school staff who are qualified both by professional training and personal conviction to teach it,

or

(b) by outside teachers (e.g. priests, ministers etc.) who are allowed to enter the school and freely teach the doctrine of their communion, and who are also professionally qualified to be teachers.

At present we seem to have either teachers who know nothing about doctrine or dogmatists who know nothing about teaching – a state of things that would scarcely be permitted in any subject that was considered serious, such as trigonometry or woodwork.

As regards books, we are in much the same difficulty. The people who are up-to-date in their theology can’t write English, and the people who can write English are either untheological or have only a sketchy impression of nineteenth-century liberal-humanist ethics mixed up with a lot of outmoded “higher criticism” – in fact their “outline” of Christian theology is like that of Mr. Mantalini’s admirers: “The two countesses had no outlines at all, and the dowager’s was a demmed outline”.8 Or as Fr. V. A. Demant9 put it: “The people who can think can’t write, and the people who can write can’t think”.

Anyway, I like your memoranda, which contain some good pungent paragraphs that I shall take every opportunity of thrusting under the noses of the clergy, and of anybody to whom I think they may do good.

Yours sincerely,

[Dorothy L. Sayers]

P.S. One small personal bleat: in official memoranda, will you favour my fancy for having my name given as it invariably appears on my title-pages and in official signatures – with the “L” in it? I have a “thing” about “Dorothy Sayers” and never use that form. I don’t mind “Sayers” by itself!

1 Headmaster of Blundell’s School, 1934–1943, later Bishop of Coventry.

2 See letter to James Welch, 17 September 1941, note 3.

3 Later editor of Penguin Classics.

4 D. L. S. discussed the matter more fully in her letter dated 28 November 1941, q.v. She had conceived the idea of a symposium, to be entitled “The Oecumenical Penguin”, to which she was willing to contribute, though anonymously. (See Giles Watson, Catholicism in Anglican Culture and Theology: Responses to Crisis in England: 1937–1949, Ph.D. Thesis, Department of History, Australian National University, especially chapter 8, “The Oecumenical Penguin: Dorothy L. Sayers and the popularisation of Christian dogma”.) The project failed to materialize.

5 Adoptionist: one of a sect who believe that Jesus Christ was the son of God by adoption only.

6 Possibly Marjorie Barber.

7 Eton College. See letter to J. D. Upcott, 1 September 1941.

8 Charles Dickens, Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby, chapter 34: Mr Mantalini to Ralph Nickleby. Instead of “demmed”, Dickens prints “demd”.

9 See letter to the Rev. V. A. Demant, 4 April 1941, note.

[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]

TO THE REV. DR JAMES WELCH

24 September 1941

Dear Dr. Welch,

Here is the Third Play – “A Certain Nobleman”.

As you will see, I have taken one or two liberties with the material, so as to episodes neatly together:

1. (Following the Archbishop of York)1 I have supposed that Mary has something to do with the household arrangement at Cana, as this obviously makes her interference in the matter of the wine much more convincing, and also gives an opportunity for introducing her account of the Finding in the Temple, and for linking that first “rebuke” with the “Woman, what have I to do with thee?” in a reasonably intelligent manner (I have put a line or two about this in the “Note on the Characters”).2

2. I have made the “certain nobleman” of Capernaum a guest at the wedding, implying that the Bride was a native of Capernaum and that the Bridegroom was fetching her from Capernaum to Cana. The “nobleman” would be invited as one of the Bride’s party. This links up the two miracles of the wine and the healing to the same set of characters, and prevents an unnecessarily congested cast, besides explaining how the nobleman came to hear about the Cana affair. The two places are not far apart, so the thing appears quite plausible.

3. I have inserted a bit out of the Sermon on the Mount into Scene Two. You will realise that it won’t be possible to put the whole sermon into one play; and I believe many commentators think that the “Sermon” is to some extent an artificial collection of scattered sayings. The exhortation to faith in God seems to fit in pretty well with the general atmosphere of this play; and the bit of wayside talk allows the Disciples to be kept before the mind of the listener, and to display themselves at one of those less-inspired moments which seem to have been very frequent with them. They too, in their way, like Mary, are coming up against the human and practical results of divine missions.

4. Similarly, I have inserted the Parable of the Virgins into the Wedding Feast. It was dramatically unconvincing for Jesus to sit though the party without uttering, except to perform a miracle; so I had to choose between letting Him give one of the recorded discourses or parables, and inventing conversation for Him. The former seemed the better way, and the Virgins fitted in reasonably well, and offered something that the servants could apply to the business of the wine. I see no reason to doubt that Jesus like other Oriental preachers (indeed, most preachers!) frequently repeated the same parable. If he did, this would account for the Evangelists having been able to remember and record them, for the occasional variations in what looks like the same story (e.g. the King’s Marriage and the Great Supper, or The Talents and the Pounds) and for the reappearance of the same story in different contexts in different Gospels.

5. You will notice that I have followed St. John for the date of the Cleansing of the Temple, for reasons which seem good to the Archbishop of York3 and to me! St. John is the only Evangelist with a really careful chronology, and he is so convincingly right about most practical details that he may very well be right about this. Again, I have expanded the speech of Jesus in the Temple, and for the same reason as at the Wedding. When one has to rely only on the car and not on the eye, it is not impressive for an important character to come on suddenly and say only one sentence – it doesn’t carry enough weight to “get over”. I have therefore made Him recite the passage from Malachi to which the remark about “the house of prayer” seems to refer (see Hoskyns4 in The Fourth Gospel) and have put the remark itself into His conversation with “the Jews”; leaving it to Simon to make explicit the reference to “the zeal of Thy house” which (says St. John) the Disciples “remembered” in this connection.

I hope you will not object to these tamperings with the text.

For the Temple Scene I have tried a technique of “running commentary”, with the actual scene faded into the narration. I hope this will work all right. To set an entirely new scene for it would have been very elaborate, and also very jerky. Done this way, it is made part of the “Nobleman” story instead of being disconnected – and it also helps the nobleman to get an idea of the new Prophet’s importance.

Forgive my boring you with all these technical details and explanations. I don’t want you to think that I am carving the text about irresponsibly or carelessly. Nearly always, these things come down to some question of dramatic structure or “theatre” presentation – the difference between the thing narrated and the thing shown. What I am trying to do is to make of the series as a whole, and of each item in the series, something that shall have the quality of a play, and not simply of a Scripture lesson illustrated by snatches of dialogue. That is why I have reduced the interventions of “The Evangelist” to the minimum (altering the Bible phrases here and there to provide extra information), and have cut out altogether the “B.B.C. Narrator” giving historical, geographical and moral instruction. This way of doing it demands a bit more alertness from the listener, to pick up the necessary data from the dialogue; but I think it is worth it, because it makes the thing more like drama and less like something intended to improve the minds of the young.

I do hope the treatment of Mary will not violently offend either the “Mariolaters” or the circles in which “Christian hateth Mary whom God kissed in Galilee”. The position adopted by the Romans and “spikes”5 when they present a Mary so divine that she apparently knows more about the Incarnation than her Son seems oddly inconsistent with the fact that she only appears in the Gospels three times between Bethlehem and Calvary, and each time to suffer rebuke; on the other hand, a Mary so utterly unaware of her Son’s true nature as she is represented (I understand) in that American play, Family Portrait,6 is irreconcilable with the Annunciation and Magnificat stories, and deeply offensive to Catholic minds. I have tried to strike a reasonable mean on the “highest human” level. The superhuman Mary is painfully undramatic – being, in fact, completely static; no character in a play can be made effective unless it experiences something in the course of the action. I shall be interested to know how this part of the play strikes your committee of all denominations – or nearly all, for the See of Peter is not represented – perhaps fortunately!

With much gratitude for all your encouragement,

Yours sincerely,

[Dorothy L. Sayers]

1 The Most Rev. and Rt Hon. Dr William Temple (1881–1944) was Archbishop of York from 1929 to 1942 and Archbishop of Canterbury from 1942 until his death. In his Readings in St John’s Gospel, 1939, Dr Temple had said: “[Mary] was apparently in some position of responsibility [at the wedding], as her concern about the wine and her instructions to the servants show”.

2 D. L. S. said: “[Mary’s] attitude to Jesus and His to her are always the great stumbling-block of this scene. I have linked this up with the episode of the Finding of Christ in the Temple, so as to show the human mother faced with the reality of what her son’s personality and vocation mean in practice”. (The Man Born to be King, “A Certain Nobleman”, Notes, The Characters, Gollancz, p. 92.)

3 Readings in St John’s Gospel, vol. 1, p. 42: “St John is right about it.”

4 Sir Edward Clement Hoskyns, Bart., author of The Fourth Gospel (1940).

5 Anglo-Catholic clergy.

6 A Family Portrait, by Lenore Coffee and William Joyce Cowen, a 3-act drama, published in 1939 in The Best Plays of 1938–39, edited by B. Mantle.

24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex

TO HER SON

1 October 1941

Dear John,

Thank you for several letters – also an elegant birthday sonnet, which I find with distress I omitted to acknowledge before.

I think it is an excellent idea that you should try for a job or something non-academic in January, if Mr. Cosgrove and Co. think you have come to the end of your furrow at Malvern. (Some Freudian complex prompted me to write “Marlborough” – effect of reading Winston Churchill, no doubt!)

The whole question of the University becomes extremely complicated in war-time. When things are normal, there is always a difference of opinion whether it is best to know a little of the world before going up, or to ease one’s self into the world though the ‘Varsity gates. In war-time this becomes acute.

In peace-time I believe it is best on the whole to take the academic part first and get it over; because the University is wider than the school, but much narrower than the world – so that a schoolboy going up there finds himself liberated, whereas, if he comes back into it from outside he is apt to feel it all very cramped and unreal.

But during a war, the unreality of college life can’t help striking anybody. Last war, of course, it was specially unsatisfactory, because all the young men were called up, and there was nobody there but the halt, the lame and the blind, and the conchies1 and people with something funny about them. This isn’t so this time. On the other hand, one goes there, and in spite of the incessant noise of ‘planes and the awful crowding of evacuees and Govt. depts. and so on, one really wonders whether the Senior Common Rooms have grasped the facts of life at all. (Especially at Oxford; Cambridge is better, having had a bomb or two.) The place is full of ardent young theorists among the undergraduates – but whether they wouldn’t theorize more usefully with a little experience to help them I rather doubt.

There is, however, one thing you will have to bear in mind: namely, that having once escaped from academics you may not want to go back there at all! One year in a job may make you feel you couldn’t stand Oxford at any price, and that the other undergraduates would by that time be too young for you. If you do feel like that, it may not matter much. During the next few years, academic degrees will be less than ever a passport to jobs – unless they are degrees in maths. and science, which seem not to be your line. The other important thing is going to be languages, and some sort of knowledge of how the minds of foreigners work – a thing which nobody ever learns in the universities. There’s going to be a devil of a lot of cleaning-up to be done in Europe, when all this is over.

It would be easier if one knew how long the War is likely to last. I think it will probably go on for some time, though of course I may be quite wrong. But Churchill seems to think so, and to be making his plans to that end, and he’s usually right. If Russia can stick it out this winter, she will probably stick it out till we are ready for a big offensive – and that may not be very soon. Or, of course, Hitler may collect himself for a big offensive on us in the Spring – and if so, it will really have to be all hands to the pumps; in which case you would probably find the University quite intolerable.

If I were in your place, I think I should be looking for something in the way of the technical side of air warfare or radio – where the maths might be of use and one’s colleagues fairly intelligent. They seem to want any number of young men for that part of the game, and I know they are an intelligent lot, because I’ve met them. Also, you would be in contact with the really intelligent British mechanic, who is a person worth knowing. And it would be something real.

Nobody loves the Universities more than I do – but a war-time Oxford isn’t the real Oxford, and that’s what’s wrong with it. It’s neither flesh, fowl, nor good red herring. I know, because I had a war year of it last time. It had neither its own virtues nor the virtues of the world.

So my own feeling on the whole is: leave school if you’ve done all you can do there, and for preference, take whatever chance the war offers, leaving Academia to look after itself. If the war is over in a year – but I don’t think it will be. And indeed, I believe we may have to arrange our lives for the next fifty years or so on the basis that wars are normal and peace the abnormality, instead of the other way round. This shocks the 19th-century Liberal Humanist, who forgets that, until the end of the Victorian era, this was the ordinary way of looking at things. It’s only the “gospel of human perfectibility” that has got us into the way of being perpetually “taken by surprise”, like Mr. Chamberlain’s government, at the appearance of human perversities which all Christendom had previously taken for granted.

My own opinion about the Universities is that people now go to them either too late (the Elizabethans got them over and done with by the time they were sixteen, and were then ready for their responsibilities) or too early. If they were made places for serious scholarship, and nobody went up till they were well over twenty, then the play-boys would be weeded out, and the genuine seekers after knowledge would be able to make the whole thing a much more mature and responsible business. But that’s only my opinion; and if I had my way I’d sweep all the people who merely want to qualify for a job into the provincial universities (which work on a much more general, “school” sort of curriculum), abolish the pass men at Oxf. and Camb:, and use them for the people who really wanted learning – for whom they would then have ample room – and who could come up when they already knew something about life. However, nobody is likely to take my suggestion in good part!

Bridgeheads are struggling against (a) the difficulty of finding people who will undertake to write books and get them finished (b) the difficulty of getting any book printed and bound in view of the paper shortage. But we toddle along and hope for the best.

Love,

D. L. F.

1 Conscientious objectors.

[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]

TO V. A. DEMANT

2 October 1941

Dear Father Demant…

As you were so kind about The Mind of the Maker, you will be pleased to know that it is selling well and steadily, and that the publisher has not only put the third edition1 in hand, but with a quiet Victorian pertinacity is actually setting the fourth in hand! The Romans seem to have taken a great fancy to it – the Universe emitting the usual dark mumble about hoping to see me follow G. K. C. into the arms of Mother Church. I have no doubt it is their job to say these things, but I do dislike being made to feel like a rabbit exposed to the slow fascination of a waiting serpent.

Yours very sincerely,

[Dorothy L. Sayers]

1 Actually the third impression.

[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]

TO COUNT MICHAEL DE LA BEDOYERE1

The Catholic Herald

7 October 1941

My dear Count,

I ought to have written to you long ago about Christian Crisis,2 which you were kind enough to send me. The fact is that, owing to a series of accidents, my reading of it was interrupted, and it got laid aside until, a short time ago, I was able to take it up again and re-read it properly.

I don’t know how your critique of the Roman position has been received by those to whom it is more particularly addressed, but from my (that is, the Anglo-Catholic) point of view it is most valuable, both as a means of clearing one’s mind and also as a means of dealing with outside criticism. Only the other day, when writing to Fr. D’Arcy,3 I mentioned the very odd sort of difficulties which confront an Anglican free-lance, who is often found in the peculiar position of having to defend Rome with one hand and Canterbury with the other against attacks upon [what] I may perhaps without offence call the combined Catholic front. The enemy has a nasty way of trying to turn the doctrinal flank – not only with what Fr. D’Arcy calls “Pope Joan” arguments (including such hoary monsters as Maria Monk, the Spanish Inquisition, Pope Alexander Borgia, and the Winking Virgin of What d’ye call it, together with the most surprising versions – or perversions – of the cult of Our Lady, the operation of the sacraments, and the pronouncement nulla salus extra ecclesiam)4 – all of which one knows more or less how to deal with – but also with more awkward criticisms about recent Vatican policy and the behaviour of the Catholic countries in the present crisis. The difficulty in coping with all these lies is knowing how much to say and how far to go. To say that all criticism is unfounded would be absurd; to “knock” Rome would be neither charitable nor politic; while to offer apologia, apology, or explanation for another communion along lines which its own members would dislike or repudiate would be a most unfortunate blunder. For this reason, if for no other, I personally welcome your book, which I shall take every opportunity of recommending to those who want to know the Church’s own mind in the matter.

Quite apart from this, there are two points which I find particularly interesting and an encouragement towards getting something practical done.

The less important, I suppose, though the most personally urgent to me, is the passage on p. 1635 which deals with the Catholic attitude to the arts and sciences – and in fact the whole of that chapter. As you may have gathered from The Mind of the Maker and also from The Zeal of Thy House, I feel strongly and indeed violently about this. Neither in my own Church nor in yours can I find any general understanding of the facts that the Christian artist (or other “maker”) must serve God in his vocation, which is just as truly his vocation as though he were called to be a priest; that if his work is not true to itself it cannot be true to God or anything else; and that bad art is bad Christianity, however much it may be directed to edification, or adorned with emasculated Christs, spineless virgins and cotton-wool angels uttering pious sentimentalities; and further, that to take novelists and playwrights away from doing good work in their own line (whether secular or devotional in content) and collar them for the purpose of preaching sermons or opening Church bazaars is a spoiling of God’s instrument and defeats its own aims in the end. It’s no good asking the artist how he knows that he is “called” to write novels rather than address meetings, and flattering him by saying that he addresses meetings so well and does such a lot of good. How does a chisel know that it isn’t “called” to be a screwdriver? – though you can, no doubt use it quite effectively for that purpose – if you don’t mind it’s presently going bust! What is so maddening is the bland refusal to allow that God can take any interest in a secular job as such – as though He only sat up and took notice if He heard His own name mentioned in it. That point of view would be natural from a Genevan “utter-depravitist”6, but from Catholics it’s preposterous. One result of all this is a total lack of any sort of Christian critical standard in the arts: whereby the Church is made to look an ignoramus, and a philistine, and a fool. No writer seems to have tackled this subject seriously – except perhaps our Brother George Every of the S.S.M.7 in that C.N.L.8 booklet – and he’s got T. E. Hulme9 on the brain, I think, with his hatred of “realistic”, or what Hulme calls “vital” art. (This is the Puritan, Barthian, not to say Manichee, fear of the secular again – a natural revolt from humanism, but surely quite unsacramental.) Besides, Brother Every doesn’t really know enough about the arts and generalises quite wildly. I tell him that the business of the ecclesiastics is to teach the artist an intellectual Catholic dogma, soak it well into him, and then, when he’s properly saturated, leave him to get on with his job in his own way. (Unfortunately, George Every doesn’t much like the general theological tone of my work, and this rather cramps my style – especially as I cannot by any means discover what his objection is.) However, he has tried to do something about this business of the Church and the Arts, which is greatly to his credit. I harangued the Malvern Conference insistently on this point – of the artist’s “autonomy of technique” – the only result being that the Bishop of Chichester toddled amiably onto the platform and said: “And I do agree with Miss Sayers that the Church must manage to get hold of the Arts again”. – Oh, dear! The C. of E.10 does suffer a great deal from her bishops.11 Mercifully we don’t have to take them quite so seriously as you do; still, some of them are a great and sore trial, however well-meaning.

The second point really is important. You say only too truly that it is hopeless to base any action on the lowest common denominator of agreement. But I am coming to think that a great deal might be done if we could among us contrive to formulate a “Highest Common Factor of Consent” about doctrine; and I believe that that factor would be higher than is generally supposed.11 One can’t, of course, hope to include in the “Church universal” the very numerous people who call themselves Christians without believing that Christ was fully God. They are not really “Christians” at all – a friend suggests that “Jesuists” would be a better name for them. But, disregarding their protests, what I’ve usually tried to put before the general public is the body of what I feel able to call “Oecumenical Doctrine” – that is, the content of the Creeds, interpreted in a way that would be acceptable to Roman, Anglican, and (so far as I know anything about them) Greek-Orthodox Christians – leaving out those points on which those bodies differ. This amounts, roughly speaking, to the doctrines accepted and defined at the Four Great Councils.12 In practice, I find that this substantial body of doctrine also commands the assent of a great number of Free Church theologians; and I have been surprised to find, in reading Dr. J. S. Whale’s book Christian Doctrine,13 how far a Congregational theologian is ready to go along “oecumenical” lines. In places, of course, (especially as regards the Catholic-Apostolic Church, Sacraments, and the Four Last Things)14 his exposition seems rather incomplete, but there is very little in it that anybody could actively object to.

It does seem to me that it ought to be possible for the Churches to say plainly: “These things, at any rate, we all believe”; and if the British public, and their children, could be made to understand at least that much of Christian dogma as a coherent theology, they would be very much better placed than they are now (a) to understand what it is all about and (b) to unite themselves intelligently to some communion or other. At present, a shocking number of them are completely ignorant that there is any rational Christian theology or philosophy, or that there is any substantial agreement whatever among Christian bodies – other than a vaguely humanist assent to the Sermon on the Mount, adorned with various horrifying scraps of mythology, ranging inconsistently from Baby-worship to savage blood-sacrifices.

I haven’t got a pastoral mind or a passion to convert people; but I hate having my intellect outraged by imbecile ignorance and by the monstrous distortions of fact which the average heathen accepts as being “Christianity” (and from which he most naturally revolts). And it does seem to me that, in the present state of confusion, the mere assimilation of the basic dogma would offer sufficient exercise for the mental teeth and stomachs of people; and further, that it would be helpful if writers and speakers and broadcasters would concentrate on those facts, and if they were able to say: “It doesn’t matter where you go – ask the Pope, ask the Patriarch, ask the Archbishop of Canterbury, ask the Moderator of the Free Church Council – they will all say the same thing about this bunch of dogma.” (I admit the obvious diplomatic difficulty of extracting anything definite from Cosmo Cantuar,15 or of coaxing the Pope and Patriarch onto one platform – but there! the Barren Leafy Tree’s very reasonable excuse that “this was not the time for figs”16 was held to be unacceptable, and there do seem to be moments when one must perform the impossible or perish!)

I don’t know why I am badgering you about all this, or what I expect you to do about it; but reading your book and Dr. Whale’s together, I am struck by the idea that in violently assaulting one another’s positions we are half the time battering at open doors, to the extreme scandal of a cynical and astonished world. I entirely agree that it is all wrong to try and compromise on dogma; but if we in fact agree about seven-tenths of the dogma, why the blazes shouldn’t we say so? If you say that the infallibility of the Pope follows logically on the Incarnation and I say it doesn’t, all right, that’s an argument; but until you and I have together hammered the Incarnation into the head of the heathen, he’s not in a position to appreciate what the argument is, still less to take sides about it; and he’s much more likely to get properly hammered if we all concentrate on that job like navvies driving a pile and get him from all sides in rhythm, so to speak. At any rate, we’re much more likely to get him that way than by a “lowest common denominator” of saying, in the liberal-humanist way, that at any rate all Christians agree that we should “believe in God and follow Christ in the spirit of love” – which means almost exactly nothing, but is what most of the people who write to The Times about religious education seem to think a suitable basis for instruction.

It seems to me, too, that a sort of “H.C.F. of Consent” might be produced with regard to “world-reconstruction on Christian lines” – this emerges from your page 19.17 I mean that we might attempt to sort out and put down in a form generally accessible how much in Nationalism, Dawnism,18 Socialism, Fascism, etc, is consistent with Christianity, and try to arrange it so as to make sense. You may say the Pope and people have done this already: no doubt they have but not quite in that form. It has usually been a sort of, “All these other things are wrong and you’ve got to get back to the Church, which says so-and-so” – which is O.K. from the negative side, but makes these people think their most passionate beliefs are unsympathetically received. Surely it would be possible to say somehow: “What’s wrong with all these things is simply that they have been defined separately. But we agree with Fascists that it is right to acknowledge values which are not merely cash-values, and with the Nationalists that patriotism is a true value, and with the Socialists about the importance of the community, and with the ‘Dawnists’ about the importance of the individual man in his body-soul, and with the Fascists about the importance of people’s secular jobs in the body politic, and even with the Capitalists that there is virtue in a reasonable measure of private property, and with the ‘State-ists’ that the secular power is to be respected – so that in a Christian society all those people would in fact discover their ‘H.C.F. of consent’.” If we could possibly make some statement of that kind, and relate it to the H.C.F. of consent in dogma at every point – wouldn’t it bear some appearance of being rational and attractive? And if all the Churches would so to speak, put their names to it, it would be rather impressive – also, we could say the same thing both at home and abroad, without having to scratch our heads each time to remember whether [those] in the Balkans were Orthodox or Uniates19 or Lutherans, or disliked the Vatican or had never heard of the Archbishop of Canterbury, because the name of their own head bloke would be there to assure them that it was O.K. by him.

But I dare say I’m only twaddling; and the minute one tries to put anything down in black and white it always sounds exactly like what has already been done by somebody and fallen as flat as a pancake. All the same, I rather stick to that phrase, “The Highest Common Factor of Consent” as a sort of guiding principle, to suggest, not that we should jettison as much as possible in order to keep afloat, but earnestly see how much stuff we can possibly squeeze into the lifeboat in order that we may survive – because there’s no point in just floating if we’re all starved to death at the end of the voyage.

It’s frightful of me to have gone on at such length. I hope you will forgive me, and put it down to my having liked your book very much. And let me take the opportunity of thanking you for your exceedingly kind reception of The Mind of the Maker. I am much relieved to find that the more “Catholic” the critic, the better he likes the book – “Catholic” including a bunch of Greek-Orthodox people, who seemed delighted to find that it had all been said by various Greek Fathers in the year dot. This is certainly a “H.C.F. of Consent”, for I have never read a word of the Greek Fathers! The only people whom it seems to worry are the vague Protestants, (who are always given to mumbling about “danger” and “presumption”, as though God might come to pieces if you pulled Him about to see what He was made of) and a few of the heathen, who think that God ought to know His place and keep Himself to Himself and not go poking His head into the kitchen.

Yours apologetically,

[Dorothy L. Sayers]

1 Count Michael de la Bedoyère (1900–1973), editor of The Catholic Herald. He questioned the morality of area bombing and the propriety of demanding unconditional surrender.

2 Published in 1941 by Burns, Oates and Washbourne.

3 Father Martin Cyril D’Arcy, S.J. (1888–1976), Master of Campion Hall, Oxford, 1933–1945; author of The Nature of Belief, 1931.

4 Latin: no salvation outside the church.

5 The passage of special interest to her contained such statements as: “I have said that the lack of a unified Christian culture …is one of the chief defects of Catholic education.…We have almost reached the stage in Catholic public opinion when nothing is regarded as Catholic unless a religious or pious or apologetic label can be attached to it. The Catholic scientist, working in his field of research, the Catholic novelist, engaged in the study of contemporary life as it is, the Catholic artist, following his natural inspiration, to none of these is the name of Catholic publicly given…” (See chapter 4, “Where British Catholics Fail”.)

6 Reference to the Calvinist doctrine of “total depravity”.

7 Society of the Sacred Mission (Kelham Hall, Nottinghamshire).

8 Christian News-Letter.

9 Thomas Edward Hulme (1883–1917), poet, essayist and writer on philosophical subjects. His works were edited by Herbert Read in two volumes: Speculations (1924) and Notes on Language and Style (1929). His theories of Imagism influenced poetry and the visual arts.

10 Church of England.

11 Cf. her letter dated 28 November 1941.

12 Nicaca (325), Constantinople (381), Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451). These were all oecumenical councils, accepted by both Eastern and Western Churches.

13 J. S. Whale, D.D., Christian Doctrine: Eight Lectures Delivered in the University of Cambridge to Undergraduates of all Faculties (Cambridge University Press, 1941, 2nd edition 1956). It was reviewed by D. L. S. in The International Review of Missions, in which she said: “Dr Whale’s book is extremely welcome, both as an assistance to those who need, for themselves or others, a comprehensive and coherent exposition of Christian doctrine that is at once brief, profound and adapted to the adult mind; and also as affording ocular proof of essential doctrinal agreement among the churches. Moreover, it is written in a vigorous and pithy style… Of its trenchant and memorable phrases there is room to quote only two: ‘Belief in God is an absolute presupposition of all rational enquiry.’ ‘The obligation to be intelligent is always a moral obligation’.”

14 Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell.

15 William Cosmo Gordon Lang (1864–1945), Archbishop of Canterbury from 1928 to 1942.

16 Mark, chapter 11, verse 13. The wording in the Authorized Version is: “for it was not the time for figs”

17 In chapter 2, “Christianity and the Last War”, referring to the failure of the settlement after World War I.

18 The belief that the use of reason would usher in the dawn of a new age. Widespread in the eighteenth century, it became associated ultimately with nationalism and dictatorship. See Bedoyère, Christian Crisis, chapters 4, 5 and 6.

19 Uniat(e), a Russian, Polish or other member of the part of the Greek Orthodox Church which, retaining its own liturgy, acknowledges the Pope’s supremacy.

[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]

TO THE REV. GEOFFREY L. TREGLOWN

22 Milton Avenue,
Romford

9 October 1941

Dear Mr. Treglown,

As you will see by my address I live not very far from you, though there is the disadvantage that very few Witham trains ever seem to stop at Romford, and I have no car.

Just at present I am very full up with work and engagements, but possibly by April the pressure will have slackened. I don’t think I could face preaching on Sunday evening, but I might manage the meeting on Monday afternoon, April 20th, if that would suit you as well. I will try not to be “tiresome and irrelevant”; I think that is perhaps a weakness of politicians rather than of women as such!

I am interested, as well as pleased, to learn that you find my theology sound, because as you probably know I am an Anglo-Catholic, and it is being borne in upon me that the theological differences between the various communions are much less acute than one might imagine, at any rate, as far as fundamentals are concerned. At present I am spending my time urging Christians of the leading denominations to pull their socks up and get out a statement on doctrine on which everybody, from the Pope to the Moderator of the Free Church Council, can agree to agree. It seems to me that this would have a good effect, besides saving lay people like me a good deal of unnecessary time and labour in telling the heathen what Christian doctrine is.

Yours sincerely,

[Dorothy L. Sayers]

24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex

TO T. S. ELIOT

16 October 1941

Dear Mr Eliot,

I was delighted to get your letter yesterday, making an offer for Common or Garden Child.1 Miss Byrne is at Cambridge, but I rang her up last night, and she rejoiced greatly, expressing herself as very well content with the terms, very glad that you proposed to publish at a moderate price2, and particularly pleased that Faber should be the publishers. However, she is writing to you herself today, so I will now get out from under your feet and leave her to treat with you directly.

I am personally very glad you like the work, because I like it myself very much, and I also know that it will be a great encouragement to her to have it taken. Also, I must again thank you for having been so kind when I accosted you, so to speak, on the tooth-snatcher’s very doorstep.3 I do hope that his odious ministrations have done all that was expected of him and that you are now really feeling a lot better. The world is quite tiresome enough, even if one is in the best of health and spirits. I really see no reason why the war should not go on for ever – at least, no cheerful reason. I suppose a complete Hitler victory might stop it, but I’m not even sure about that! Perhaps we should make up our minds to accept war as a natural state of things and adapt ourselves to it. Poets and story-tellers, facing a perpetual paper-shortage, will have to re-learn the art of recitation; and we must firmly refuse to be surprised at the phenomenon of sudden death, or the absence of bananas.4 I am rather glad to be relieved of bananas – they taste of nail-polish, and I can’t imagine why we ever spent money on them.

With all good wishes and most sincere thanks,

yours very sincerely,

Dorothy L. Sayers.

1 Muriel St Clare Byrne’s memoir of her childhood was published in 1942.

2 Seven shillings and sixpence.

3 They appear to have met at the dentist’s.

4 Cf. her poem, “Lord I thank thee…”, first published in 1942: “I detest bananas,\ A smug fruit, designed to be eaten in railway carriages\ On Bank Holidays,\ With a complexion like yellow wax\ And a texture like new putty\ Flavoured with nail polish.” (See Poetry of Dorothy L. Sayers, ed. Ralph E. Hone, ed.cit. 1996, pp. 123–128.)

[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]

TO THE REV. DOM. R. RUSSELL

Downside Abbey

28 October 1941

Dear Father Russell,

Mrs. Mitchell has kindly forwarded to me your most generous review of The Mind of the Maker. I am very glad indeed that it has pleased you, as well as other Catholic theologians, who have treated it in a very friendly way. Anybody who rushes in on theological ground without any sort of technical training naturally lays himself open to the severest criticism, and ought to be only too grateful if the experts refrain from tearing him into fragments and dancing derisively on the remains. But everybody has been most indulgent. (Even the Protestants seem more apprehensive than angry – but then they will treat God as an elderly invalid who might collapse from shock if suddenly intruded on by a common person bouncing in suddenly.)

Perhaps I ought to say something about your censures. I entirely agree that “Bigamy is a crime” – that is precisely what it is, for us – though not for Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Luxuria is on the other hand, always a sin – though either may occur without the other. (Thus, bigamy committed in ignorance is still a crime, and lust, though it leads to nothing illegal, is still a sin.) But the point I was making was that the criminality of anything depends upon the consent of opinion; its sinfulness is an entirely different matter.

It should be fairly clear, I think, from the book as a whole that all three persons of the Trinity are essentially concerned in creation. My emphasis on the particular function of the Son is due to the fact that surprisingly few people realise that the Son is supposed to have anything to do with the Creation at all. The prevalent idea is that God the Father made the world (with perhaps a little assistance from the Spirit of God, since He is mentioned in Genesis as “brooding” over the business), but that the Son, the Logos, the Energy, took no part in the job at all, and apparently took no interest in it except to redeem it when it had gone wrong.… The majority of Protestants are, in their hearts, Adoptionists1, or Arians2 at the best, and the common-or-garden heathen has no more idea than the man in the moon that the Son is supposed to have had any existence prior to the appearance of Jesus on earth. Consequently, the very idea that the same God who made the world also suffered in the world is to the ordinary man an entirely alien notion, and if you try to tell him that this is what is meant, he thinks you are making it up. No language, however strong, violent, or emphatic will expunge from the mind of the average anti-Christian the picture he has formed of Christian Soteriology,3 viz: that Jehovah (the old man with the beard) made the world and made it so badly that it all went wrong and he wanted to burn it up in a rage; where-at the Son (who was younger and nicer, and not implicated in his Father’s irresponsible experiment) said: “Oh, don’t do that! if you must torment somebody, take it out [on] me.” So Jehovah vented his sadistic appetite on a victim who had nothing to do with it all, and thereafter grudgingly allowed people to go to heaven if they provided themselves with a ticket of admission signed by the Son … This grotesque mythology is not in the least exaggerated: it is what they think we mean – consequently the whole Incarnation doctrine is for them completely meaningless. I say, “the average anti-Christian”; I don’t say “the average un-Christian”. One man, for instance, wrote to me that the idea that the God who suffered and the God who created were the same God was to him a complete novelty, which if it were really what Christians believed, would clear up a whole area of what had been Stygian4 obscurity. Might he say that God the Father suffered? I said that, strictly speaking, he might not – that was Patripassianism,5 and would land him in difficulties later on; but that even Patripassianism was a distinct improvement on the barbaric superstitions which he had had presented to him as the Christian religion, and that he might certainly say that the Creator suffered . … I don’t know what happened to him after this; he was a naval officer, and I am afraid he may have been a casualty, as he promised to keep in touch, but has not done so.…

I didn’t set out to “defend my thesis”, but only to show that I had, at any rate, paid attention to those parts of your review which were less favourable. My original and chief intention was to thank you for having given my odd theological adventure so kind and serious an attention. In particular, too, for your resolute support in refusing to regard the book as a “personal angle on God”. I am weary of this evil and adulterous generation, with its monstrous deification of insignificant personalities. If a thing is not true in itself, the fact that I say it will not make it any truer; nor is it any addition to God that a popular novelist should be so obliging as to approve of Him. Since the book deals with creative art, it is a relevant fact that I am a professional writer; it might also be relevant that I am a Master of Arts and former scholar of Oxford University – since this would tell the reader what standard of judgment to expect. But the publisher thought it would be unwise to mention this fact – the public might, I suppose, be alienated by any suggestion that the writer is educated or qualified for his job. “The name is enough” – and of that fact I am still scholar enough to be ashamed.

I am sorry to conclude on this gloomy note! But what fun it would be if all books were compelled by law to appear anonymously for the next twenty years or so! There would be such a bonfire of reputations.

Yours with much gratitude,

[Dorothy L. Sayers]

1 See letter to the Rev. Neville Gorton, 24 September 1941, note 5.

2 See letter to Father Herbert Kelly, 4 October 1937, note 2.

3 The doctrine of salvation.

4 From the river Styx, one of the rivers of Hades in classical mythology, meaning dark, obscure.

5 See letter to Father Herbert Kelly, 4 October 1937, note 5

[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]

TO MURIEL ST CLARE BYRNE

16 November 1941

Dearest M…

The other day I went to speak to some soldiers about Detective Fiction, at a camp near Harwich. Driven there by a very nice girl who has to do with the Entertainments Committee. All very good going; but on the way back, the car conked out completely in a desert-looking place in the pitch dark. Garage turned out to be fortunately near. Garage man happily a pet – but, less fortunately, an enthusiast. He put the thing partially right (the girl so ignorant that she didn’t even know a sparking-plug when she saw it: “are those the long things on wires?”). We started again, but were unhappily inspired to stop and ask the way, whereupon the engine conked out again in a place still more dark and deserted. Meanwhile, the enthusiast had had his doubts about us and pursued us in a car; which was nice of him. But such was his enthusiasm that he could not be persuaded to leave the ruddy car alone and run us home in his. He proceeded to take the engine to pieces by torchlight. This game went on till about 11.30 (nobody having had dinner). The car, having had its plugs changed and been given dope to clean its valves, grew more and more sulky and nervous. Then he proceeded to take down the carburettor, clean the jets, and hint darkly that the petrol was full of sand and paraffin. The car began to show signs of collapse; and was stimulated by having the mag[neto] taken to pieces and the points reset. Happily, this was too much for the poor creature, who, having suffered many things of this particular physician, gave a hollow groan and rendered up the ghost. So the enthusiast had to drive us back after all; and it turned out he was the local comic man and dance-band enthusiast, so all the way back he enlivened us with items from his repertoire. I reached home at 12.40, very cold and empty. Mac said I had been on the binge with the soldiers, and that I was drunk and a liar. So I threw my boots at him and so to bed!1

In the midst of all this agitation, I have finished the fifth play.2 They are coming out fairly well, but not one bit Children’s-Hour. Judas is shaping rather nicely, I think; and Matthew is a poppet. He is so common and so sweet. Dr. Welch is deeply in love with Matthew. Eric Fenn apparently had a qualm, because he didn’t like to think that a gospel should be named after a person so vulgar and illiterate, and began mumbling about the “Fragment of Papias”.3 Dr. Welch, however, said strong-mindedly, “Never mind that qualm, old boy! Matthew is a real live person”. I said (over the ‘phone to Welch) that I thought it was rather rubbish to say that a person couldn’t have a Gospel named after him on account of his commonness – and that anyhow Matthew was a tax-collector, and they were the lowest of the low – like rotten little Vichy officials putting the screw on their own countrymen for the benefit of the Nazis – and one couldn’t get over that, could one? I think Val will like Matthew; he will be a nice change from the dignified and refined stage-peasant who always haunts religious plays.4 Matthew comes into the fourth play mostly, but I’ve managed to squeeze a little fun out of him in the fifth. He is a landsman (he would be, of course) and doesn’t at all like being in a storm on the Lake of Galilee, with water sloshing into the boat and people walking on the water at him, poor lamb! I am getting quite fond of the disciples. And, by the way, I have the feeling of “guessing right” about Judas, because the things seem to be fitting in – you know how they do. The only thing that still bothers me is the thirty pieces of silver. They bother everybody. But I daresay it will all come out in the wash.…

Yours rather irritable but still going strong,

With love,

D. L. S.

1 An echo of the Diary of Samuel Pepys, who ended several of his entries: “I threw my boots at her [his wife] and so to bed”.

2 “The Bread of Heaven”.

3 Papias (c. 60–130), Bishop of Hierapolis, credited with fragments on the origin of the Gospel of St Matthew by Irenacus and Euscbius.

4 The dialogue between Matthew and Philip in Scene 1 of the fourth play, “The Heirs to the Kingdom”, was read aloud to journalists at the press conference on 10 December. Reported sensationally, it caused an uproar.

[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]

TO MAURICE B. RECKITT

19 November 1941

Dear Mr Reckitt,

Many thanks for your letter and for the proofs of Miss Byrne’s article.1

The origin of the latter was really that I mentioned to Fr McLaughlin (on the way to Malvern) that Miss Byrne felt very strongly that unless, in the various plans for a Christian Social Order, the Church was ready to face the difficulty about the status of women, there would be no chance of any real improvement, since the continued existence of an exploited class exploiting the exploiters would hamper any efforts towards a stable economic situation. In consequence of this, Fr McLaughlin suggested that she should contibute something towards the forthcoming discussion in Christendom. Unhappily, when the first articles on the subject appeared, it was clear that, while Miss Kenyon had not, perhaps, precisely shirked the issue, she had so framed the question as to allow of its being shirked. Worse still, both Peck and Casserley – particularly the latter – had profited by this loophole to introduce both the revolting vulgarities and the factual inaccuracies that usually disfigure these discussions.

One really cannot allow such things to pass, lest one should seem to admit them by default.

There is, of course, every reason to distinguish what are, properly speaking, “feminine functions”. The fundamental assumption, however, that has to be attacked is the unexamined dogma that this functionalism extends to the whole of life, and that they are the most important disjunction of human activities. For example: the domestic function of a cat, quâ cat, is to catch mice; the question whether a tom or a moggy should be employed for this purpose rests on no distinction of ability in that vocation, but on the individual preference for kittens or smells about the house. Indeed, this particular vocation can quite well be exercised by a neuter (a solution of the problem against which there is a prejudice in the case of humanity). The tom is not held to be “aping” the moggy or the moggy the tom, when either carries out the common feline function of hunting.

The thing that is intolerable is the assumption that woman’s preoccupation with sex extends to all her activities, and that, when performing any common task (whether agreeable or disagreeable) which is not demonstrably determined by sex, she is “trying to beat the men at their own game”. In actual practice, when the fitness of a woman for a particular job of work has been established for a long enough time, and when that job is a thing which the workers themselves take seriously, it is never judged by the sex of the worker, but by the standard of accomplishment. For instance, nobody, I am happy to say, has reviewed The Mind of the Maker as a “feminine angle on God”: though if the book had been written 100 years ago, nothing but a male pseudonym would have saved it from such treatment.

The vote, as you say, was merely a symbol. Of itself it can do nothing while the minds of both men and women are clouded by the obsession of sexuality. The letter killeth; the spirit giveth life. But it is something to have even the letter of the law, since it provides a framework within which the spirit can work.

That women are not satisfied with their present “emancipation” [I] readily admit – how could they be, when the letter of it is continually traversed by a spirit which does all it can to make their status as uncomfortable as possible?

The present uproar about the calling-up of women is typical. When the war began, eager women were told to go away and play: the men must be absorbed first. Now, women are wanted: but they are not conscripted on a common human basis, with a promise of hard work and adequate pay. All they get is sloppy “appeals” and low wages.…2 Why should they be treated like that? I am not treated like that by my publishers, who take my work seriously. My sex does not exonerate me from necessary labours, nor does it debar me from proper remuneration; consequently, I do what has to be done and do it with reasonable readiness.

But do not tell me that things are not better today than they were. I remember my father’s sisters, brought up without education or training, thrown, at my grandfather’s death, into a world that had no use for them. One, by my father’s charity, was trained as a nurse; one, by wangling, was received into the only sisterhood that would take her at her age – an ill-run community, but her only refuge; the third, the most attractive3, lived peripatetically as a “companion” to various old cats, saving halfpence and cadging trifles, aimlessly doing what when done was of little value to God or man. From all such frustrate unhappiness, God keep us. Let us be able to write “hoc feci”4 on our tombstones, even if all we have done is to clean the 29 floors of the International Stores.

Yours very sincerely,

[Dorothy L. Sayers]

1 See letter to Maurice B. Reckitt, 12 July 1941 and note 8.

2 She refers here to a letter in The Times of 17 November 1941, signed by Katharine Furse, who wrote: “…women have been called on mainly to fill gaps, but not to take a lead in responsibility”…

3 The sisters mentioned are Edith (1859–1917), a nurse: Anne (1858–1948), joined Community of St Katherine of Alexandria: Gertrude (1860–1931).

4 Latin: this I did.

[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]

TO THE ARCHBISHOP OF YORK1

24 November 1941

Your Grace,

I am afraid I had already written to Miss Carcaud to cry off the Brains Trust idea. I probably said I was very busy, which is quite true.

But also, I have to admit that I am not fearfully fond of Brains Trusts. The way in which the B.B.C. is running their show has made me shy off the thing. They seem to be giving people the idea that art and learning are a kind of parlour game, in which the fun is to shoot questions at well-known “authorities” on these subjects, in the hope of catching them out. The result is, especially in the lamentable case of Professor Joad,2 that quick wits and superficiality ring the bell every time, whereas the sounder people, who never advance any statement without verifying their references, are put at a great disadvantage. This seems to me a pity, because people are already sufficiently inclined to despise facts and authority, and to prefer snap judgment[s] and personal opinions. I am a fairly good examination candidate myself, and this probably inclines me all the more to distrust this particular game, since I know, only too well, through having been constantly judged above my merits during my scholastic career, how unreliable a game it is.

Consequently, I really should very much prefer not to take part in a Brains Trust if you will not think me too tiresome, and obstructive – greatly as in some ways, I should enjoy the fun. I ought also to add that the plays I am doing for the B.B.C. are going to keep me pretty busy up to Easter, what with writing them and going up to London for rehearsals, and so forth; so that a good deal would depend on the proposed date, even if my constitutional shrinking from the game itself could be overcome.

Trusting that you will understand my reluctance,

Yours sincerely,

[Dorothy L. Sayers]

1 The Most Revd Dr William Temple.

2 See letter to Dr James Welch, 2 January 1941, note 5.

[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]

TO MISS AMY DAVIES1

26 November 1941

Dear Miss Davies,

It is curious and interesting that you should have been first “interested and thrilled” by The Mind of the Maker and afterwards startled by the unintelligibility of “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged”, because that is rather like being charmed by the Differential Calculus and disconcerted by the Multiplication Table. Because the one, in each case, presupposes the other; and if the doctrine summarized in “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged” is not true, The Mind of the Maker is meaningless nonsense.

I’m afraid it would take too long to answer all your questions fully. But I may try to clear up a few misconceptions.

First of all, you seem surprised that “The Greatest Drama” should contain “all the old arguments”. Actually, it contains no “arguments”; it is merely concerned to state, in the simplest possible language, what it is that the Church asserts about Christ. Naturally, the statements are the “old” statements. A primer of Arithmetic, whether written by some one as ancient as Euclid or as modern as Einstein, will still contain the same old stuff about the product of two plus two and the same uncompromising information as to how many beans make five. The Christian Creeds contain certain statements of what purport to be historical and philosophic fact, to which the whole apparatus of Christian ethic and principle form the superstructure. Without those facts, the whole structure collapses; and the first task of “clear thinking” is to realise that such is the case.

You are more confused, I think, than is really necessary about the doctrine of Christ’s “double nature”. His personality is, according to the Christian faith, the personality of God, expressed in human terms . … And, as far as that goes, of course Shakespeare was an “ordinary commonplace person” with genius. Did you think he was some kind of monster? The word “commonplace” of course begs the question, since, if you start by saying that a genius is something out-of-the-common, then “commonplace man of genius” is a contradiction in terms. But there is no sense whatever in which a genius does not share the common humanity of the ordinary commonplace person; indeed, in so far as he attempts to dissociate himself from common humanity, he is so much less the genius . … But the Divinity asserted of Jesus is the Divinity of His personality; His body, mind, and emotions were fully human, and the Church has never thought otherwise. (The Nestorians, who thought He had two personalities, human and divine, were pronounced heretical – and that line of thought has always proved sterile and contradictory.)

As regards the miraculous – Jesus never said He was able to work miracles because He was God. He said over and over again that anybody could work miracles. The working of miracles is, or should be, a human power. But they can only be worked under certain conditions. The will has to be wholly submitted to God’s control, for one thing. There must be a similar response in the wills of those receiving the miracle (a concentrated atmosphere of antagonism could prevent even Jesus from performing any miracles). And the miracles could not, or must not, be worked for selfish ends. If Jesus had multiplied food for himself, or if he had called in “legions of angels” to escape crucifixion, he would have been doing something contrary to his own nature. That is the meaning of that story about the Temptation. A power derived from complete selfishness literally cannot be used for selfish ends; because the egotism dries up the power at the source. It was literally true that “he saved others, himself he could not save”.

What makes you assert that he was “apparently sexless”? This is a very wild statement, supported by no documentary evidence whatever. Of his thirty-three years of life, we know about only three. By that time we certainly find a person in whom the passion for the work that was to be done had swallowed up all other passions. But whether that state was arrived at without struggle we simply do not know at all. A single devotion will, in fact, destroy all lesser devotions; the single-hearted person has usually no attention to give to competing interests – but this has nothing to do with physical peculiarity but with dominant purpose. One thing at least is very remarkable: that Christ, alone of all religious teachers, made no difference between women and men, laid down no separate rules for female behaviour, was equally unselfconscious with both sexes, gave just the same serious attention to the questions and opinions of women as of men, never used female faults and failings to point any particular moral, and indeed, made sex no part whatever of his teaching, except to say, when challenged, that men were as much to blame as women for sexual sins, and that dirty thinking was just as bad as dirty living. He appears, in fact, to have been completely sane on the subject – a thing quite impossible to any abnormal person, and unusual in anybody. But he certainly did not give that exaggerated importance to sex which became fashionable among European romantics, who somehow got it into their heads that it was the be-all and end-all of existence. The Christian Church has admittedly been very much less sane than he was; but it had to cope with a bad Jewish and pagan tradition in the matter, which it has not yet got rid of. Here, by the way, Art and Christianity are at one; sex has inspired great works of art; but not the very greatest. The very greatest music and poetry and painting and architecture deal with things more important and fundamental.

Naturally, the whole stigma of crucifying God is in the fact that He came “incognito” – that is to say that, so far from “loving the highest when we see it”, we do not see it, and merely hate it instinctively. Nor did He come with the “determination to be crucified”; but in the face of the fact that (as it very soon became obvious) men were determined to crucify Him. Every man crucifies God, and every man is crucified with God, wittingly or unwittingly. But crucifixion is redemptive only if it is accepted by the will. But the thing called “original sin” is precisely the direction of the human will towards itself instead of towards its own real nature – the inability to do the things one really wants to do, because of the determination to exercise a selfish choice which conflicts with one’s real aims. (Psychologists know about this splitting of the will all right, though they don’t always recognise that it is the same thing which the Church has known about for many centuries under a different name.)

Then you say “what is the crucifixion of one man – even if he were a God-man – compared with all the pain and agony of hundreds of men etc now?” – But that is the crucifixion, as St. Paul says. Every time it happens, the Son of Man is crucified afresh. The Crucifixion of God is an epitome of all history2 .…

I think you would find things clearer if you were to read a little real theology, because, if I may say so, you give me the impression of never having been grounded properly in the subject. I get the impression that you acquired a sort of “child’s-eye” view of Christian doctrine in early youth, and have never done any stiff reading on the subject, so that you are now judging with an adult mind doctrines which have only been presented to you in very simplified form – rather as though you were to say that Shakespeare’s profundity had been much over-rated, when actually you had never read the plays themselves, but only something called “Shakespeare for the Nursery”. I say this, because you seem to have supposed that The Mind of the Maker was something different from “the same old arguments”, whereas it is, in fact, just the same old arguments, founded on the same old dogmas. I think what you really want is to see how one gets, as it were, from the one to the other. Because, as I said before, The Mind of the Maker is pure nonsense if you regard it as a piece of original invention – or at least, if not absolute nonsense, it is quite irrational, because it corresponds to no historical reality.

I suggest that you might like J. S. Whale’s book Christian Doctrine, just published by the Cambridge University Press, seven shillings and sixpence, which is a remarkably sound and “modern” statement of “the same old arguments”. C. S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain might be useful, too, on the particular point bothering you.

Yours very truly,

[Dorothy L. Sayers]

1 Identity unknown.

2 Cf. her play The Just Vengeance.

[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]

TO THE REV. W. T. ROBINSON1

27 November 1941

Dear Mr. Robinson,

Thank you for your letter. I am very much honoured by your choice of The Mind of the Maker as a study book for your group.

I’m afraid I’m not very good at setting “examination-papers”, especially on social subjects.

One question, however, I do feel ought to be discussed, and that is the whole question of “work”, and the connection and contrast between “employment” and “vocation”. I have dealt with this matter in one or two public speeches – not as yet available in print – and have outlined the question in the “Postscript” to The Mind of the Maker.2

In particular, there is the question of the secular vocation, and the mutual responsibility between it and the Church. The complaint of the secular vocational worker against the Church has been very ably voiced by Michael de la Bedoyère3 in his book Christian Crisis… viz: the failure of the Church to respect the integrity of a secular vocation as such and to give it religious sanction. She thus contrives to separate man’s activities into work done specifically “to serve God” (“religious” activities), and work done for other ends; ignoring the religious obligation of the worker to the work itself – i.e. the service of God in the service of the work. I’m not putting this very clearly. I mean, allowing that “who sweeps a room as to God’s praise makes that and the action fine”,4 the primary act of “worship” involved is, not to sing hymns as you sweep, or to look on sweeping as a devotional act, but to sweep properly. In other words, unless the room is “made fine”, the action will not be fine and will not be worship.

One aspect of this is the one I have touched on in the “Postscript” – the failure to demand that the work required of the citizen shall be “worth doing and well done”. I need not say any more about this – except, perhaps, one thing, which you might think it worth while to discuss. I believe it is much more right to teach people to “serve the work” than to “serve the community”. The latter phrase sounds more Christian and altruistic; but it leads to some very unfortunate results in practice:

1. It is apt to be interpreted as: “to satisfy public demand”, and so lead to the production of things worthless and even harmful. If economics demands the mass-production of cheap trash, it is readily supposed that such production is justified, since it “satisfies public demand” for such things and also “creates employment” – a vicious circle.

2. If a worker thinks of himself as “serving the community”, he will probably proceed to think that “the community” ought to serve him in return. The thing becomes reduced to an assertion of personal rights, on a system of “social contract” and barter and exchange. The corruption of egotism begins to work at once, and falsifies everything that is done. But to “serve the work” leaves less room for egotism; since the artefact has no obligation towards the artificer, but only the artificer to the artifact.

3. In practice; to make any work with one eye on the audience does, in fact, tend to damage the integrity of the work. That is why books and plays written to please a public are so brittle and bad. If the work is good, it will (eventually) please the public by its goodness; but you can’t get that sort of goodness if you “take your eye off the ball”. There is a sort of fundamental insincerity about work produced for anything but its own sake.

There is also the very important (as I think) matter of the specialization of labour. However satisfactory it may be economically, to keep one workman perpetually doing a single process, or to prevent a worker from transferring himself from one kind of work to another, the net result of this, in human terms, is that the worker gets no idea of the job as a whole, or of the connection between one kind of job and another, and is thus prevented from ever really “looking to the end of the work”. (A W.E.A.5 man told me the other day how dreadful it seemed to him that in the silk manufactory where he had worked most of his life, the girls on the looms never even saw the beautiful stuff they were producing. Another confirmed the delight and pride of some women employed on making naval equipment – I forget exactly what – on being taken to a war-ship and recognising their own work in the finished product, which they had never before seen.) Employers, of course, find it cheaper to run things on the one-man-one-process basis; but when, for the sake of speeding things up in war-time, or from a desire to give workers a more intelligent attitude to their work, they do try to shift workers about a bit, they complain that the Trade Unions are mulishly obstructive. This needs arguing out.

I think, too, one might discuss whether “the crushing burden of armaments” is really any more crushing than the burden of making and marketing unwanted goods for the sole purpose of keeping up production and forcing surplus exports on countries that don’t want them, in order to keep world-markets going. (Peter Drucker’s End of Economic Man6 has something about this; also there’s that alarming little book Ouroboros by Garet Garrett7 in Kegan Paul’s Today and Tomorrow Series – as cogent now as when it was written. Also V. A. Demant’s essay in Christian Polity: “Nationalism and Internationalism”). – And query: Whether the war-time restrictions on consumption and compulsory saving etc, necessary for the production of armaments might not be borne with equal cheerfulness for the production of public works in peace-time, and if not, why not? And here again: if we were as much interested to produce the works of peace as the weapons of war, could we achieve some such end voluntarily, or must we be planned and compelled into it? (Note: that the production of weapons of war is obliged, to a great extent, to “serve the work”, because nothing but good work will stand up to the strain of battle. Is war-work, in that sense, more healthy than the merely commercial works of peace?)

Apart from all this, there is the relation of religion to the arts. They are now hopelessly at loggerheads. Artists, on the whole, get from the Church no strong backbone of religious faith to direct and inspire their work. They are brought up, of course, on the same doctrinal pabulum as the common man, which is mostly vague and sloppy. The Church, knowing and caring nothing about the integrity of art per se, keeps on making feeble efforts to drag the artist away from serving his own work, to serving official religion; or else falls back on bad and wishy-washy “religious art”. (For note: if, e.g., a writer does happen to be writing books or plays with a strong Christian backbone, or is, on other evidence, known to be a Christian, the parson does not cooperate by urging people to read the books and see the plays, and so encourage the writer to go on producing them. No – he gets in the way of the writer’s work by hauling him off to address meetings, open church bazaars, preach sermons, and talk to young people – work for which the writer may be quite unfitted and for which, if he is to remain an honest workman, he has neither time nor energy. And note further: that the writer, by undertaking work for which he has no genuine vocation, damages his own powers; but if he tells the parson this, the parson always replies: “Think of how much good you will do and how you will be serving the community”. Which brings us back to the previous point about “serving the work” and “serving the community”. All this happens because official religion does not take secular vocation seriously; it is a special instance of this general question.)

I’m afraid I have jotted all this down rather sketchily, but it may suggest some lines of argument.

I feel very strongly about all this question of work and vocation, because it seems to me that the whole thing has got topsy-turvy, and that the planners of New Orders are starting from the wrong end. They so seldom bother about what work is to be done, or to what purpose; and “the worker” is coming to mean less and less somebody whose life is bound up in his work, and more and more somebody who uses his enforced labour as a political weapon – in fact, an instrument of “power politics” in the most truculent sense of the words. And I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.

Yours sincerely,

[Dorothy L. Sayers]

1 Identity unknown.

2 Postscript: “The Worth of the Work” (Methuen, 1941, pp. 177–184). D. L. S. here says that what distinguishes the artist from someone who works to live is the desire to see the fulfilment of the work. “As the author of Ecclesiasticus says, he ‘watches to finish the work’ …that is, he sees the end-product of his toil exactly as the artist always sees it…” (p. 179). D. L. S. quotes Ecclesiasticus also in The Zeal of Thy House, where parts of Chapter 39, verses 27 to 34 are sung as an interlude after the first scene.

3 See letter to him, 7 October, note 1.

4 From the poem by George Herbert, set as a hymn by Sandys, beginning “Teach me, my God and King”. The lines are misquoted; they should read: “Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws\ Makes that and the action fine.”

5 Workers’ Educational Association

6 Published in 1939. D. L. S. recommends it in Begin Here, under “Books to Read”, p. 157.

7 Ouroborus: or the Mechanical Extension of Mankind by Garet Garrett was first published in 1926. D. L. S. read it then and it increased her uneasiness about the advertising profession. In 1944 she wrote a Foreword to another book by Garet Garrett, A Time is Born (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1945), expressing views she had been putting forward in her letters during the early 1940s.

[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]1

28 November 1941

I have started several times to write to you about the Theological Literature Association, and each time some other urgent matter has cropped up and interrupted me. It was not possible for me to attend the meeting in Oxford; but I hope things went well.

I am in entire agreement with you about the urgent need both for readable books which present Christian doctrine in a form that can be assimilated by adult pagans, and for books to instruct the ignorant, whether children or adults. Quite apart from anything else, the unhappy “Lay Apostolate” are at present in a most harassing position. The hungry sheep who (for various reasons) refuse the official pabulum, baa round them insistently, and are fed only with the greatest difficulty from very insufficient material by these amateur shepherds. And it’s all very well for our bishops and pastors to encourage us with approving shouts – we still have to scratch for the stuff, cook it up and serve it out as best we can, to the peril of our souls and tempers, and at imminent risk of handing out a lot of poísonous weeds with it, in our haste and lack of preparation.

One of our biggest difficulties is this: that so extreme is the public’s ignorance of what the accepted doctrine is, and so great its distrust of orthodoxy, that whenever we present it in assimilable form, we have to spend hours of time and pounds in postage-stamps explaining to correspondents that this is not a a new gospel of our own invention, and that it differs from the regulation diet in nothing but in being served up in plain English and without slop-sauce or sectarian skewers. If only, having, as it were, attracted the sheep to the church door, we could then hand them over, saying “Go in – you’ll find all the stuff there”. But they won’t go in, and half the time the stuff isn’t there, but something that looks quite different. So we find ourselves frantically trying to feed sheep with one hand and do our proper work with the other, to the neglect of both and the great scandal of everybody!

Well, now, what do my sheep want? They keep on bawling for

(a) “A book which tells me all about Christian dogma.” They want it written in reasonable English and not in technical theological jargon. They want it to be aware of the particular difficulties experienced by the adult 20th-century mind. And they don’t want it “churchy”, or polemical; and they don’t want everything in it to be contradicted by the next book they read, which happens to be written by a member of a different communion.

The best I’ve found so far are J. S. Whale’s Christian Doctrine2 and Leslie Simmonds’ Framework of Faith.3 The former slips into anti-Roman polemic here and there, and the latter occasionally seems to leap a gap of argument without quite bridging it; but they both cover the ground and are up-to-date and reasonably aware of the common man’s habits of thought. Bede Frost’s Who?4 is good for the purely theistic argument, but goes no further; and there are some goodish books on Christology, but what’s wanted most is orderly presentation of the structure of Christianity as a whole. (N.B. Fr Simmonds’ book was burnt alive in the London blitz, which has made it rather useless to recommend it; I don’t know whether it is now available again. And Whale’s book only came out this autumn – so that hasn’t yet helped much. But these two books seem to me on the right lines.)

(b) “A book about the New Testament.” People want to know the order in which the books of the N.T. were written, and what modern scholars think about their dates, authenticity, and so on. Most people still imagine that the “Higher Criticism” has more or less exploded half the Scriptures, and they don’t know anything about the results of recent archaeological research or textual criticism. And it’s no good giving them bibliographical treatises on the Synoptists, full of tables of comparison and hiccuping references to “Q” and “Proto-Matt” and “M” and “m” and “LM” scattered all over the shop, because they didn’t read a Language School at Oxford and don’t know what to make of all those games. The popular idea they have got of the results of biblical criticism is something like this:

“Everything in the N.T. was written centuries after it all happened, by people who pretended to be the disciples, but weren’t really, and who misunderstood most of what they had been told and deliberately altered the rest.

“Mark wrote a simple human story without any theology in it.

“Criticism has proved that Matthew and Luke, where they are ‘early’, are a bad rehash of Mark, with some tendentious theology put in; and where they are ‘late’ are liars.

“John was written at least several centuries after all the disciples were dead, by a Greek philosopher who invented a lot of things for Jesus to say, to link up with Plato, or something.

“Paul invented the Church, contrary to Christ’s intention.

“Any ‘early’ document is ‘purer’ than any later document; if Paul’s Epistles are really earlier than the Gospels it looks as though there was a screw loose somewhere – but there isn’t a handy book which gives us the dates; and we know Paul must be wrong because that is a well-known fact, proved by Criticism.

“None of the historical dates and facts in the Gospels agree with contemporary history. There is some sort of muddle in Luke about the census, for instance.

“The Protestants say that the Church depends on the Scriptures; the Catholics say that the Scriptures depend on the Church. We think that the Scriptures were selected and made into the Bible by a committee of Fathers, but we don’t know when, or why they selected those particular books. Nor do we know if there really were any other books to choose from, still less what they were like.

“Criticism has proved that the texts of all the books differ a great deal and are very unreliable. Most of the texts people argue about and use to prove theology are interpolations. Whenever we find a text that seems to prove Christianity, our agnostic friends tell us that one can’t use it, because it is John, or Paul, or Matthew, or late, or an interpolation or only found in one manuscript; and Criticism has proved that everything that is any of these things must be wrong.”

Going on from these two persistent bleats, I am inclined to demand further:

(c) A book that will give some coherent and intelligible account of how doctrine came to be formulated – at what dates, under what pressure from events and popular heresies, under what other circumstances, and by whom. Also, in what way these doctrines are implicit in the Scriptures and in the teaching of Christ and the experience of the early Church. (The general impression is that everybody was getting along nicely with the Simple Gospel, consisting chiefly of the Sermon on the Mount and Suffer-little-children, till a number of professional argufiers took it into their heads to have some theology, and so gave rise to heresies.)

(d) A Handbook to Heresies – not arranged under the names of the Heretics, but according to the subjects: Heresies about God, about Christ, about the Trinity, and so on, so that one can look them up quickly; with the dates and history of the people who started thinking that way, and why it was an unsatisfactory way to think; also, who refuted them, and what Council condemned them. And also, the names of the gentlemen who hash them up for public consumption today under the impression that they are brilliant new contributions to contemporary thought. (I am tired of being taunted with “neo-Orthodoxy”; I want, for a change, to see a few “original and revolutionary thinkers” identified as neo-Manichees, neo-Nestorians, neo-Sabellians, and so on.)

(e) A scholarly book along the lines of Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture,5 only not so bulky, difficult and expensive, showing how the happy pagan thinkers got themselves into much the same sort of intellectual and religious muddle, and the same “flight from reason” as ourselves, through too much all-round tolerance and devotion to scientific humanism; and how “Athanasian” orthodoxy didn’t produce the Dark Ages, but was the only thing stiff enough to get through them and come out the other side. Also, that the apparent alteration of the Church’s attitude to State affairs after Constantine (with the appearance of compromise, casuistry, legality, and all the rest of it) was not just naughtiness and truckling to Caesar, but a consequence of the fact that she had, for the first time to accept responsibility for what happened in the world and the State, and was thus brought up against the “problem of power” in an acute form.6

(f) A book about the technical terms used in Theology, most of which are now meaningless to the common bloke, or else carry quite misleading meanings: e.g. person, substance, being, sacrifice, reason (ratio sapientiae, including what we know now as “imagination”, not merely ratio scientiae7 – if you talk about the “Divine Reason” or the “Logos” people think you mean inductive reasoning and logic), prophecy, sin, “begotten of the Father” (always supposed to refer exclusively to the paternity of the human Jesus), nature, worship, flesh, etc. etc. Anderson-Scott has done a little pamphlet on these lines, called Words (S.C.M. sixpence), but it is limited to New Testament words and does not, I think, deal fully with the way words change their meaning in course of time, or in passing from one technical vocabulary to the other. (For instance, the gradual deterioration of the word “reason” in passing from the Middle Ages, through the 18th century, to the 20th-century scientific use, or the similar change in the word “science” itself; or the difference in meaning between “energy” as used in physics, in theology, and in common speech. Also, the book should make it clear to people that Theology is a science, with technical terms of its own, which its exponents have as much right to use as other scientists have to use their technical terms; and that it is just as silly to argue about theology without bothering to learn its technical vocabulary as it would be to dispute physics with physicists under the impression that “force” means to them what it means to Hitler, or to try and disprove the propostion (a + b) (a – b) = a2 – b on the ground that, as a is a vowel and b is a consonant, you cannot subtract one from the other. (At least half the misunderstandings of the common man are due to the fact that he supposes theological terms to mean exactly what they mean in common speech, and that he thinks they have no right to mean anything else. And it’s not much good to say to him, “Go away and learn the vocabulary”, because he would immediately say, “All right, but where is it?”)

You will notice that a number of these suggestions more or less coincide with those made by Cross, Manson, etc.8

I also heartily endorse the demand made by Symons for some sort of statement about oecumenical Christian doctrine (not “Christian principles”) to be issued by leading theologians of all the great communions, both as a basis for school instruction, and also as a reply to the common allegation (see, e.g. Mozley in the October Hibbert Journal)9 that it’s no good the Churches demanding instruction in doctrine because they can’t agree about what the doctrine is. But I have hopes that something may be about to materialize in this field, if all goes well with a plot that is a-hatching at the moment.10

Whale’s protest against dogmatic theology is happily belied by his practice in his recent book on Christian Doctrine, which is almost classic in its dogmatic orthodoxy. In my experience (such as it is) the resentment and hostility of which he complains are aroused in their most violent form by any assertion that Jesus is fully God. It seems to me that on this point Christians would do well to stick to their guns and take whatever hostility is coming to them. The early Church that people are so fond of quoting doesn’t seem to have shrunk from exciting hostility on this subject. If the battle of Nicaea has to be fought all over again, it might as well be fought now, without any further attempts at appeasement.

I agree with Prestige11 et al. that some sort of guide to existing publications would be very helpful. It must be a catalogue raisonnée, with brief outline of content and treatment, and indication of the amount of “theological literacy” each book presupposes in the reader. The catalogue should also contain references to books like R. O. Kapp’s Science versus Materialism,12 which, while not specifically Christian or even Theist, aim at cutting away the ground from under the various pseudo-scientific antagonists within their own territory.

As regards books on Christian Social Order, it seems very necessary that something should be done about the matter of Work and Vocation, which has got into a most hideous muddle. It is not pleasant to see men’s labour, which should be their life, reduced to being a mere aspect of power-politics. I [had] got T. M. Heron13 to write a book about this for the Bridgeheads series; but unhappily, just as he was getting along beautifully, Lord Woolton14 came and took him away, and God knows when he will be able to get finished. I believe Demant is also interested in this question. Along with it goes the question of the Church’s attitude to secular vocation concerning which Michael de la Bedoyère has an impassioned chapter in Christian Crisis;15 and the relations between the Church and the Arts, on which I touched at Malvern.16 It’s not a matter of the Church “getting hold of the Arts”, as the Bishop of Chichester seems to imagine.17 It’s a matter of (a) presenting the artist with a brand of Christianity which can inform and inspire his secular work, and (b) recognising the autonomy of the artist’s vocation as such. As it is, the greatest living creative force in the secular world is functioning right outside the pale of Christendom. Incidentally, this is why so many religious books are ill-written and incomprehensible to the ordinary man with no practice in, or reverence for, words, no vital power with words, and no sensitiveness for the associations which words arouse in the reader. (Ditto with Church painting and music.)

This letter is already more than sufficiently long, more than sufficiently belated, and much less than sufficiently helpful. But the whole thing gives me the feeling of struggling with an octopus in a jungle. Christopher Dawson18 seems to feel quite hopeless about it — but I think he exaggerates!

Yours sincerely,

[Dorothy L. Sayers]

1 This letter is reproduced from a typed copy of the original. It has no salutation and it is not known to whom it was addressed. A copy was sent to Mrs Bell by D. L. S., enclosed in a letter dated 26 April 1942, thanking her for hospitality and saying she hoped the “memorandum” would amuse the Bishop. The copy in Lambeth Palace Library is headed “Letter from Miss Dorothy Sayers”. This indicates that it was not typed by her secretary, who would not have omitted the “L”. It may have originally been addressed to the convener of the Theological Literature Association, whose meeting in Oxford D. L. S. had been unable to attend.

2 See letter to Michael de la Bedoyère, 7 October 1941, note 12.

3 Leslie Frank Simmonds, Framework of Faith (Teaching of the Church Ser., 1), London 1939.

4 Bede Frost, Who?: A Book About God, London 1940.

5 C. H. Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine, Oxford 1940.

6 Cf. her Introduction to The Emperor Constantine.

7 See letter to the Rev. T. Wigley, 1 September 1941, note 4.

8 It is evident that a memorandum of the proceedings of the meeting of the Theological Literature Association had been sent to her.

9 Lieut.-Col. E. N. Mozley, D.S.O., “Religious Liberty and the B.B.C.”

10 D. L. S. and Dr James Welch were planning a series of talks by representatives of the chief Christian denominations.

11 See letter to Maynard D. Follin, 23 July 1942, note 10.

12 Reginald Otto Kapp, Science Versus Materialism, London 1940.

13 See letter to V. A. Demant, 10 April 1941, note 7.

14 Woolton, 1st Earl of (1922–1969), Director-General of Equipment and Stores in Ministry of Supply (1939–1940), Minister of Food (1940–1943).

15 See letter to him dated 7 October 1941.

16 At the Conference held in January 1941.

17 See letter to Count de la Bedoyère, 7 October 1941.

18 Christopher Dawson (1889–1970), Roman Catholic author and lecturer. D. L. S. recommends his Beyond Politics under “Some Books to Read” in Begin Here.

On 10 December a press conference, organized by Dr Welch, was held at Berners Hotel, Berners Street, London. Dr Welch addressed the assembled reporters and D. L. S. read aloud a statement she had prepared about the plays, stressing the use of modern English and the impersonation of Christ by an actor. She was asked to read a few examples of the dialogue. One of the scenes she chose was the beginning of the fourth play, “The Heirs to the Kingdom”, where Matthew reproaches Philip for having been cheated by a merchant. The journalists leapt on the informality of Matthew’s speech.1 The Daily Mail came out with the headline: “B.B.C. Life of Christ Play in U.S. Slang”. Other papers reported sensationally on the use of modern English and the representation of Christ. There was a violent public reaction. The Lord’s Day Observance Society and the Protestant Truth Society mounted a determined opposition. Petitions were sent to the Prime Minister and to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Questions were asked in the House of Commons. The desks of newspaper editors were deluged. Leaflets of protestation were handed out in public places.

On 13 December Dr Welch wrote:

…It is outrageous that the cheap press should write of these plays as the Daily Mail has done…But I am entirely convinced that the conference was well worth holding, partly because we wanted to capture the attention of listeners who do not normally listen to religious broadcasts…but chiefly because I entirely support you in your determination to cast the whole play into modern language and to make the characters real.…

D. L. S. replied:

1 Matthew: “Fact is, Philip my boy, you’ve been had for a sucker. Let him ring the changes on you proper. You ought to keep your eyes skinned, you did really. If I was to tell you the dodges these fellows have up their sleeves, you’d be surprised.”

[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]

TO DR JAMES WELCH

15 December 1941

Dear Dr. Welch,

The Man Born to be King

In case any difficulty is being caused by the attitude of the cheap Press and the Lord’s Day Observance people, I think it may help to clarify your position if I make my own position clear.

Under the terms by which I am contracted to the BBC, I have the right to insist that the plays shall be performed as I have written them, subject only to your personal approval (which I have already received in writing) and the technical requirements of production. If there is to be any question of tinkering with the general presentment, or with isolated passages, in order to appease outside interests, I shall be regretfully obliged to withdraw the scripts, under the terms of the contract.

You will understand, I am sure, that I would not consent to complete the series, or permit any parts of it to be broadcast, under conditions which would interfere with the integrity of my work; since this would be fair neither to yourself nor to me, nor to the producer.

Yours very sincerely,

[Dorothy L. Sayers]

24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]

TO HER SON

18 December 1941

Dear John,

Best congratulations on your scholarship.1 I thought you would pull it off all right. Well done.

Now, of course, all the arguments begin over again. Mr. Ridley2 naturally thinks you would be better at College than doing war-work, and passionately rebuts the suggestion that Oxford is behaving in a remote and academic way. It’s very difficult to tell how to act for the best. It depends a good deal on how long the war is going to last, and that’s a thing nobody knows. I mean, if it’s going on for another ten years or so, there will be plenty of time for doing Oxford first and the war later. If it only goes on for another two or three years, your generation will find itself in that rather awkward position of being at one and the same time “privileged” and out of touch, when it comes to tackling the problems of peace. I’m sure that we have got to avoid, this time, any sort of chasm between the “intellectuals” and the rest of the nation. Of course, the whole thing is really a hopeless dilemma. Last time, the best younger intelligences joined up instantly, went to France and were killed; so that we were left with a remnant of C33 people and conchies,4 who (being inflicted with an inferiority complex about the war) started a de-bunking campaign against all the “manly virtues” and landed us with a lot of difficulties. So that’s an argument against war and for education. But this time, if we try to hold on to the younger intelligences, it may only mean that they will still be in the same position, but that there will be more of them — and they may also find that there is a certain class-prejudice against those whose educational facilities have given them shelter.

Anyhow, I quite agree with Ridley that it’s a question of how you feel about it. If you like to go up straight away, take Oxford at a gallop, so to speak, and then carry on, it might after all be the best way. The loss of one term won’t really matter much. You have brains enough to catch that up. What are you thinking of reading?5

If you think it over and tell me what you really judge would suit you best, I’ll make whatever financial arrangements are necessary.

Love and again congratulations,

D. L. F.

Despite the continuing uproar, rehearsals went ahead, not in Broadcasting House, where a suite of dramatic studios had been demolished in a raid, but in the tiny Grafton Theatre in Tottenham Court Road, from which all the plays were broadcast. The first play, “Kings in Judaea”, went out on 21 December and D. L. S. wrote in gratitude and relief to Val Gielgud:

1 John Anthony had just won a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. (Balliol was Lord Peter Wimsey’s college.)

2 Roy Ridley was to be John Anthony’s Tutor. He was the physical original of Lord Peter Wimsey. See Barbara Reynolds, Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul, pp. 56–57. See also letter to Catherine Godfrey, 29 July 1913, pp. 79–80, and note 21; letter to Muriel St Clare Byrne, 6 March 1935, pp. 345–346, and note 2 (The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1899–1936).

3 A medical category which exempted men from being called up.

4 Conscientious objectors.

5 John Anthony read Modern Greats, i.e. Philosophy, Politics and Economics, known as P.P.E. He obtained a First-Class degree.

[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]

TO VAL GIELGUD

22 December 1941

Dear Val,

This is just to say, once more, thank you for giving “Kings in Judaea” such a grand cast and such a lovely show. Whatever happens, I do and shall always feel most tremendously grateful for the sympathy and enthusiasm you’ve put into it all, and I’m frightfully sorry that you should have had all this extra bother and fuss and worry about it, especially when you were so overworked and so tired. It really is a shame, and I feel it’s all my fault. I do think you’re a delightful person to work for – and if there’s anything you want me to do for your shows I’ll do it if I possibly can – always supposing that both our names aren’t mud when the fighting is over; in which case, all we can do is to stick in the mud together and suffer for our convictions.

I came home to find my husband full of enthusiasm – and he is a person difficult to enthuse about serious shows. He thought it came over splendidly and was a fine show. So did my friend Miss Barber, who is staying with us – (she is writing you a little fan-letter on her own account; I think you probably met her once with me and Muriel Byrne).

There were one or two little points I forgot to say in the fuss and flutter yesterday for instance, Laidman Browne1 made such an excellent job of reading the Evangelist bits. That’s not a showy job, but it’s one that can do a lot of damage to the show if it’s done wrong, and he got it dead right, without being either flat or unctuous. And I didn’t have an opportunity to praise Val Dyall,2 who was a perfect bit of casting for Melchior – or the chap who played Matthias3 and had such a grand demagogue style of oratory. For some reason, actors often get that kind of thing unconvincing, but he was excellent. These little bits, quite apart from the work of the leading people, most of whom I did manage to thank. Oh! except “little Zillah” I didn’t see her, to speak to, but I did say to you how good I thought she was.4 Nobody could want a show better cast or produced, and I feel you done me proud.

I hope you weren’t too utterly exhausted. I nearly fell asleep in the train coming home, though I hadn’t been doing any work at all, and it really was dreadful for you having to toil to Manchester. I hope your dinner tonight will be worth it!

Well, bless you and all the best – and as good a Christmas as any producer can possibly hope to spend on the panel!

Yours ever,

[D. L. S.]

D. L. S. wrote in similar terms of gratefulness to Dr Welch, who replied on 24 December:

You thank me! Oh no: thank you, for a play which brilliantly handled a complicated historical situation, for giving the actors something which really “got ’em” and for your lovely and reverent handling of the Nativity.…

1 Laidman Browne (1896–1961). He is remembered in the roles of Caesar, William the Conqueror, Henry V, etc. in 1066 and All That.

2 Valentine Dyall (1908–1985), son of the actors Franklin Dyall and Mary Merrall.

3 Abraham Sofaer (1896–1988), Burmese actor on British stage from 1921.

4 Maureen Glynne.