Letters to a Diminished Church by Dorothy Sayers

Anyone who is in the field of Classical Education will know that Dorothy Sayers', "Lost Tools of Learning" is a required text. Since I already owned Letters to a Diminished Church I figured I should read that as well. She is witty and sharp and I can see why C.S. Lewis loved her.

The book is a series of essays making "Passionate arguments for the relevance of the Christian doctrine." while she touches on everything from "What Do We Believe?"  to "Why Work?" her real passion is for literature and the Christian esthetic.

The Greatest Drama Ever Staged
— is the official creed of Christendom

"The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man—and the dogma is the drama." (p.1) Sayers laments that somehow we have managed to make the greatest drama dull. "So that is the outline of the official story—the tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten, when he submitted to the conditions he had laid down and became a man like the men he had made, and the men he had made broke him and killed him. This is the dogma we find so dull—this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero." (p. 4)

What Do We Believe?

Now, there does exist an official statement of Christian belief, and if we examine it with a genuine determination to discover what the words mean, we shall find it is a very strange one. And whether, as Christians declare, man was made in the image of God or, as the cynic said, man has made God in the image of man, the conclusion is the same-namely, that this strange creed purports to tell us the essential facts, not only about God, but also about the true nature of man. (p. 10)

• I believe in god the Father Almighty, Maker of all things.
• And in the only-begotten Son of God, by whom all things were made. He was incarnate; crucified, dead and buried; and rose again.
• I believe in the Holy Ghost, the lord and life-giver.
• And I believe in one Church and baptism, in the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.

The Dogma is the Drama

We have done a poor job of communicating our dogma and so the world has an incorrect view of what we believe is true. The unbeliever might say God is "always ready to pounce on anybody who trips up over a difficulty." (p. 17) Or that Jesus is needed to calm God down when he's angry and "if we try to live like him, God the Father will let us off being damned hereafter and only have us tortured in this life instead." (p. 18) Christian virtues are, "Respectability, childishness; mental timidity; dullness; sentimentality; censoriousness; and a depression of spirits." (p. 19)

The response deserves an extended quote:

Let us, in heaven's name, drag out the divine drama from under the dreadful accumulation of slipshod thinking and trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction. If the pious are the first to be shocked, so much worse for the pious— others will pass into the kingdom of heaven before them. If all men are offended because of Christ, let them be offended; but where is the sense of their being offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like him? We do him singularly little honor by watering down his personality till it could not offend a fly. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ.

It is the dogma that is the drama—not beautiful phrases, nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death—but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world, lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe. 

The Image of God

What does it mean to be created "in the image of God"? Sayers answers, "The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and ability to make things." (p. 25) Specifically we can create almost ex nihilo using language. 

"The creation is not a product of the matter and is not simply a rearrangement of the matter. The amount of matter in the universe is limited, and its possible rearrangements, though the sum of them would amount to astronomical figures, is also limited. But no such limitation of numbers applies to the creation of works of art. The poet is not obliged, as it were, to destroy the material of a Hamlet in order to create a Falstaff, as a carpenter must destroy a tree form to create a table form. The components of the material world are fixed; those of the world of imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction or rearrangement of what went before. This represents the nearest approach we experience to creation out of nothing, and we conceive of the act of absolute creation as being an act analogous to that of the creative artist. Thus Berdyaev is able to say: 'God created the world by imagination.'" (p. 31)

Creative Mind

Creative minds have the ability to tell the truth through creative means. 

"A work of fiction, for example, possesses poetic truth, provided that the author has rightly seen which things can so be related as to combine into a convincing unity—provided, as Hard says, the work is an act of consistent imagination. If the imagination is consistent, the work will produce effects as if it were actually true." (p. 39)

Creed or Chaos?

Sayers begins the essay with, "It is hopeless to offer Christianity as a vaguely idealistic aspiration of a simple and consoling kind; it is, on the contrary, a hard, tough, exacting and complex doctrine, steeped in a drastic and uncompromising realism." (p. 49)

"Today, if we could really be persuaded that we are miserable sinners—that the trouble is not outside us but inside us, and that therefore, by the grace of God, we can do something to put it right—we should receive that message as the most hopeful and heartening thing that can be imagined...But once we have established the true doctrine of man's nature, the true nature of judgment becomes startlingly clear and rational. It is the inevitable consequence of man's attempt to regulate life and society on a system that runs counter to the facts of his own nature." (p. 65)

Strong Meat

"The story of Passiontide and Easter us the story of the winnowing of that freedom and of that victory over the evils of time.  The burden of the guilt is accepted (“He was made Sin”), the last agony of alienation from God is passed through (Eloi, lama sabachthani); the temporal body is broken and remade; and time and eternity are reconciled in a single person. There is no retreat here to the paradise of primal ignorance; the new kingdom of God is built upon the foundations of spiritual experience. Time is not denied; it is fulfilled. 'I am the food of the full-grown.'"

The Other Six Deadly Sins

Our culture has decided that sex encompasses all sin. Therefore to speak of sin is to speak of sex. And while there is sexual immorality and ought to be called out as such, we whitewash away the other sins far too easily.

Anger: "But we do not always recognize this ugly form of possession when it cloaks itself under a zeal for efficiency or a lofty resolution to expose scandals—particularly if it expresses itself only in print or in platform verbiage. It is very well known to the more unscrupulous part of the press that nothing pays so well in the newspaper world as the manufacture of schisms and the exploitation of wrath. Turn over the pages of the more popular papers if you want to see haw avarice thrives on hatred and the passion of violence." (p. 85)

 Gluttony: "The gluttonous consumption of manufactured goods had become, before the war, the prime civic virtue. And why? Because the machines can produce cheaply only if they produce in vast quantities; because unless the machines can produce cheaply nobody can afford to keep them running; and because, unless they are kept running, millions of citizens will be thrown out of employment, and the community will starve." (p. 88)

Covetousness: "It was left for the present age to endow covetousness with glamor on a big scale and to give it a title that it could carry like a flag. It occurred to somebody to call it enterprise. From the moment of that happy inspiration, covetousness has gone forward and never looked back. It has become a swaggering, swash-buckling, piratical sin, going about with its head cocked over its eye, and with pistols tucked into the tops of its jack boots. Its war cries are “Business Efficiency!” “Free Competition!” “Get Out or Get Under!” and “There's Always Room at the Top!" It no longer works and saves; it launches out into new enterprises; it gambles and speculates; it thinks in a big way; it takes risks. It can no longer be troubled to deal in real wealth and so remain attached to work and the soil." (p. 93)

Envy: "Envy is the great leveler. If it cannot level things up, it will level them down; and the words constantly in its mouth are “my rights” and “my wrongs.” At its best, envy is a climber and a snob; at its worst, it is a destroyer; rather than have anybody happier than itself, it will see us all miserable together.
"...The difficulty about dealing with envy is precisely that it is the sin of the have-nots, and that, on that account, it can always find support among those who are just and generous minded. Its demands for a place in the sun are highly plausible, and those who detect any egotism in the demand can readily be silenced by accusing them of oppression, inertia, and a readiness to grind the face of the poor." (p. 99, 100)

Acedia or Sloth: "In the world it calls itself tolerance; but in hell it is called despair. It is the accomplice of the other sins and their worst punishment. It is the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive only because there is nothing it would die for. We have known it far too well for many years. The only thing perhaps that we have not known about it is that it is a mortal sin."

Pride: "[T]he head and origin of all sin is the basic sin of superbia or pride. In one way there is so much to say about pride that one might speak of it for a week and not have done. Yet in another way, all there is to be said about it can be said in a single sentence. It is the sin of trying to be as God. It is the sin that proclaims that man can produce out of his own wits, and his own impulses, and his own imagination the standards by which he lives: that man is fitted to be his own judge. It is pride that turns man's virtues into deadly sins by causing each self-sufficient virtue to issue in its own opposite, and as a grotesque and horrible travesty of itself. The name under which pride walks the world at this moment is the perfectibility of man, or the doctrine of progress; and its specialty is the making of blueprints for utopia and establishing the kingdom of man on earth.
"For the devilish strategy of pride is that it attacks us, not on our weak points, but on our strong. It is preeminently the sin of the noble mind—that corruptio optimi that works more evil in the world than all the deliberate vices. Because we do not recognize pride when we see it, we stand aghast to see the havoc wrought by the triumphs of human idealism. We meant so well, we thought we were succeeding—and look what has come of our efforts!" (p. 105)

Christian Morality

Sayers says the church has worked very hard since Christ's ascension to remove the foul stench of the charge that he was "a gluttonous man and a winebibber" by being wholly against those sort of things.

Now, if we look at the Gospels with the firm intention to discover the emphasis of Christ's morality, we shall find that it did not lie at all along the lines laid down by the opinion of highly placed and influential people. Disreputable people who knew they were disreputable were gently told to go and sin no more; the really unparliamentary language was reserved for those thrifty, respectable, and sabbatarian citizens who enjoyed Caesar's approval and their own. And the one and only thing that ever seems to have roused the meek and mild Son of God to a display of outright physical violence was precisely the assumption that “business was business.” (p. 112)

The Triumph of Easter

In answer to the age-old question regarding the existence of evil in world made by a supposed all-loving, all-knowing, and all-benevolent God, Sayers answers, 

... we must look at Christ. In Him, we shall discover a Mind that loved his creation so completely that He became part of it, suffered with and for it, and made it a sharer in His own glory and a fellow worker with Himself in the working out of His own design for it...We find God continually at work turning evil into good...He takes our sins and errors and turns them into victories, as He made the crime of the Crucifixion to be the salvation of the world. "O felix cupla!" exclaimed St. Augustine, contemplating the accomplished work. (p. 121)

Why Work

In this beautiful essay, Sayers advocates for what she says is nothing less than revolutionary. Work for the sake of the work, not for the utility of it or the benefits to society, but as a God-honoring activity.

What I urged then was a thoroughgoing revolution in our whole attitude to work. I asked that it should be looked upon—not as a necessary drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God. That it should, in fact, be thought of as a creative activity undertaken for the love of the work itself; and that man, made in God's image, should make things, as God makes them, for the sake of doing well a thing that is ell worth doing. (p. 125)

Toward a Christian Esthetic

Sayers contemplates the "Christian Esthetic" and finds there isn't one, saying, "...oddly enough, we have no Christian esthetic—no Christian philosophy of the arts." (p. 147) She begins with the analysis of art by both Plato and Aristotle and finds them wanting because of their lack of Truth to inform them. But we, being made in the image of a creating God, can follow in His footsteps.

“The true work of art, then, is something new; it is not primarily the copy or representation of anything. It may involve representation, but that is not what makes it a work of art. It is not manufactured to specification, as an engineer works to a plan—though it may involve compliance with the accepted rules for dramatic presentation and may also contain verbal ‘effects’ that can be mechanically accounted for. We know very well, when we compare it with so-called works of art that are turned out to pattern, that in this connection neither circumcision availeth anything nor uncircumcision, but a new creature. Something has been created.” (p. 159)

In fact, true art reveals Truth.

“This recognition of the truth that we get in the artist's work comes to us as a revelation of new truth. I want to be clear about that. I am not referring to the sort of patronizing recognition we give to a writer by nodding our heads and observing: ‘Yes, yes, very good, very true—that's just what I'm always saying.’ I mean the recognition of truth that tells us something about ourselves that we had not been always saying, something that puts a new knowledge of ourselves within our grasp. It is new, startling, and perhaps shattering, and yet it comes to us with a sense of familiarity. We did not know it before, but the moment the poet has shown it to us, we know that, somehow or other, we had always really known it.” (p. 164) 

The Faust Legend and the Idea of a the Devil

Sayers reflects on the difficulty we have in portraying the Devil in art and literature. The problem is that we have bought a lie that good and evil are in some sort of conflict. She calls that a heresy.

“The orthodox Christian conception is more subtle and less optimistic; it is also much less involved in the time process. For it, the light and the light only is primary; creation and time and darkness are secondary and begin together. When you come to consider the matter, it is strictly meaningless to say that darkness could precede light in a time process. Where there is no light, there is no meaning for the word darkness, for darkness is merely a name for that which is without light. Light, by merely existing, creates darkness, or at any rate the possibility of darkness. In this sense, it is possible to understand that profound saying, “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things” (Isaiah 45:7). But it is at this point that it becomes possible for the evil and the darkness and the chaos to boast: “We are that which was before the light was, and the light is a usurpation upon our rights.” It is an illusion; evil and darkness and chaos are pure negation, and there is no such state as “before the light” because it is the primary light that creates the whole time process. It is an illusion; and that is the primary illusion inside which the devil lives and in which he deceives himself and others...That is the Devil's claim, the exact statement of the pride by which he fell from heaven. It sounds extremely fine; and when it is set forth in attractive language, it is sometimes difficult to remember that the Devil is a liar and the father of lies. In Paradise Lost, we find Satan making the same claim; he “feels himself impaired” because of the authority of the Son of God. He believes, or affects to believe, that he himself is anterior to the Son, and ought not, therefore, to be subject to him. In the subsequent argument with Abdiel, he shows himself a poor logician, but we may, if we like, suppose that by this time he really believes in his own claim, or has argued himself into the illusion of belief—for the corruption of the will saps the intellect, and the Devil is ultimately a fool as well as a villain. He is, let us believe by all means, the victim of his own illusion. But Milton is not; Milton knows, and says, that the Son is anterior to Satan, and is, in fact, the very power by whom Satan was created. In the orthodox Christian position, therefore, the light is primary, the darkness secondary and derivative; and this is important for the whole theology of evil.” (p. 173)

I particularly love her conclusion:

"Evil is the soul's choice of not-God. The corollary is that damnation, or hell, is the permanent choice of the not-God. God does not (in the monstrous old-fashioned phrase 'send' anybody to hell; hell is the state of the soul in which its choice becomes obdurate and fixed; the punishment (so to call it) of that soul is to remain eternally in the state it has chosen." (p. 176) 

Problem Picture

 Sayers final essay reflects on the "problem" as she sees it, although that term gives her pause. 

“It has become abundantly clear of late years that something has gone seriously wrong with our conception of humanity and of humanity's proper attitude to the universe. We have begun to suspect that the purely analytical approach to phenomena is leading us only further and further into the abyss of disintegration and randomness, and that it is becoming urgently necessary to construct a synthesis of life. It is dimly apprehended that the creative artist does, somehow or other, specialize in construction, and also that the Christian religion does, in some way that is not altogether clear to us, claim to bring us into a right relation with a God whose attribute is creativeness.” (p. 241)

She goes on to state:

“But if we do—if we conclude that creative mind is in fact the very grain of the spiritual universe—we cannot arbitrarily stop our investigations with the man who happens to work in stone, or paint, or music, or letters. We shall have to ask ourselves whether the same pattern is not also exhibited in the spiritual structure of every man and woman. And, if it is, whether, by confining the average man and woman to uncreative activities and an uncreative outlook, we are not doing violence to the very structure of our being. If so, it is a serious matter, since we have seen already the unhappy results of handling any material in a way that runs counter to the natural law of its structure.” (p. 245)  

Finally, she beautifully concludes:

 “As for the common man, the artist is nearer to him than the man of any other calling, since his vocation is precisely to express the highest common factor of humanity—that image of the creator that distinguishes the man from the beast. If the common man is to enjoy the divinity of his humanity, he can come to it only in virtue and right of his making.” (p. 275)