Love Wins: Dorothy L. Sayers

I would love to hear what Dorothy L. Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey would say about John Piper. Lord Peter who finally won his bride by bending his will and his pride, to apologize to her for his sense of privilege that made him think she would eventually give in to him if he just pursued her long enough. Lord Peter who after saving her from the gallows (at the end of [Strong Poison] the novel you quoted), gave her life back to her two novels later by letting her risk it in the search for truth, as any male hero of a novel would. Lord Peter, who finally won Harriet's heart by treating her as his full, functional equal in every area of his life.

Lord Peter would have only one word to say about a man who would counsel a woman to submit "for a season" to being abused by a man. "Cad." It's an old word, and perhaps one that should be revived.

--Kristen

Thanks to Kristen for the insightful and imaginative comment.  She inspires us to see that Dorothy L. Sayers, like Rob Bell (whose recent book I've not yet read), writes to suggest how Love Wins.  In fact, not only does Sayers take time to give real life to Lord Peter Wimsey she also gives a few moments and words to fleshing out just what this sort of love means, how love wins.  So here we listen again.  It's not a simple sound bite but instead a long excerpt I'm including here, one in which we might truly imagine John Piper confronting Peter Wimsey, or at least Piper reading Sayers's novels and confronting the author about her Wimsey.  You'll overhear her addressing her reader as "My dear," at which point I've interpolated a phrase (e.g., "My dear [evangelical reader]") in order for us all to imagine that it's the evangelical reader Piper with whom she's speaking.  So stay tuned even through to her hell word below (but don't miss that fact that her writing here is on love, that it continues on to be musings Sayers offers us on how love wins).  This considerable bit is from Sayers's chapter, "The Love of the Creature" in her book, Mind of the Maker:

IX. THE LOVE OF THE CREATURE

It may be objected that the analogy we have been examining derives from the concept of Platonic archetype, and is therefore unacceptable to those who reject Platonic ideal philosophy.  That way of putting it is, however, not quite accurate; in fact, it puts the cart before the horse.  To the creative artist (as we have seen) the archetype is not an a priori theory, but an experience.  From this experience he draws his analogy direct, and by its means illustrates and gives form to his philosophy, so that the philosophy is seen to derive from the analogy, and not viec versa.  If at any points it coincides with Platonic or Christian philosophy, it does so as an independent witness.  The experience is, of course, a particular experience -- that of the human creator, and it is irreclevant for the analytical and uncreative critic to object to it on the ground that it is not his experience....

To the human maker, therefore, accustomed to look within himself for the extra-temporal archetype and pattern of his own creative work, it will also be natural to look beyond himself for the external archetype and pattern of his own creative personality ... [to the creative] Person in whose image he is made, as his own work is made in the image of himself.

At this point, however, he encounters certain difficulties which we shall have to consider, if we are not to be led away into undue literalism by our very natural anxiety to make our analogy go on all-fours.

The whole of existence is held to be the work of the Divine Creator -- everything that there is, including not only the human maker and his human public, but all other entitites "visible and invisible" that may exist outside this universe.  Consequently, whereas the human writer obtains his response from other minds, outside and independent of his own, God's response comes only from His own creatures.  This is as though a book were written to be read by the characters within it.  And further:  the universe is not a finished work.  Every mind within it is in the position of the audience sitting in the stalls and seeing the play for the first time.  Or rather, every one of us is on the stage, performing a part in a play, of which we have not seen either the script of any synopsis of the ensuing acts.

This, it may be remarked, is no unusual situation, even among human actors.  It is said of a famous actress that for many years she played Lady Macbeth with great success, without having the faintest idea what the play was about or how it ended....  At the most, perhaps, towards the end of his life, he may see a few episodes in which he figured run through in the pages of contemporary history.  And from the completed episodes of the past he may gather, if he is intelligent and attentive, some indication of the author's purpose.

There is one episode in particular to which Christianity draws his attention.  The leading part in this was played, it is alleged, by the Author, who presents it as a brief epitome of the plan of the whole work.  If we ask, "What kind of play is this that we are acting" the answer put forward is:  "Well, it is this kind of play."  And examining the plot of it, we observe at once that if anybody in this play has his feelings pared, it is certainly not the Author.

This is perhaps what we should expect when we consider that a wrok of creation is a work of love, and that love is the most ruthless of all the passions, sparing neither itself, nor its object, nor the obstales that stand in its way.  The word "love" is by no so over-weighted with associations, from the most trifling to the most tremendous, that it is difficult to use it so as to convey a precise meaning to the reader; but here agin the analogy we have chosen may be of service.

Two popular interpretations of the word we can dismiss at once:  the creator's love for his work is not a greedy possessiveness; he never desires to subdue his work to himself but always to subdue himself to his work.  The more genuinely creative he is, the more he will want his work to develop in accordance with its own nature, and to stand independent of himself.  Well-meaning readers who try to identify the writer with his characters or to excavate the author's personality and opinions from his books are frequently astonished by the ferocious rudeness with which the author himself salutes these efforts at reabsorbing his work into himself.  They are an assualt upon the independence of his creatures, which he very properly resents.  Painful misunderstanding of this kind may rive the foundations of social intercourse, and produce explosions which seem quite out of proportion to their apparent causes.

"I have ordered old brandy; I know you adore old brandy."

"What makes you think so?"

"Oh, I have read your books:  I know Lord Peter is a great connosseur of old brandy."

"He is; that needn't mean that I am."

"Oh!  I thought you must be, as he is."

"What on earth have my tastes to do with his?"

It is quite possible that the author does like old brandy (though in this particular instance it happens not to agree with her).  But what is intolerable is that the created being should be thus violently stripped of its own precious personality.  The violence is none the less odious to the creator, for the ingratiating smirk with which it is offered.  Nor is the offence any more excusable when it takes the form of endowing the creature with qualities, however amiable, which run contrary to the law of its being:

"I am sure Lord Peter will end up as a convinced Christian."

"From what I know of him, nothing is more unlikely."

"But as a Christian yourself, you must want him to be one."

"He would be horribly embarrassed by any such suggestion."

"But he's far too intelligent and far too nice, not to be a Christian."

"My dear [evangelical reader], Peter is not the Ideal Man; he is an eighteenth-century Whig gentleman, born a little out of his time, and doubtful whether any claim to possess a soul is a rather vulgar piece of presumption."

"I am disappointed."

"I am afraid I can't help that."

(No; you shall not impose either your will or mine upon my creature.  He is what he is, I will work no irrelevant miracles upon him, either for propaganda, or to curry favour, or to establish the consistency of my own principles.  He exists in his own right and not to please you.  Hands off.)

Sometimes the suggestion to use force is accompanied by obliging offers of assistance.  (Incidentally this type of petition must be extremely familiar to God Almighty.)  Thus:

"Couldn't you make Lord Peter go to the Antarctic and investigate a murder on an exploring expedition?"

"Now, from what you know of him, can you imagine his being inveigled into an Antarctic expedition, under any conceivable circumstances?"

"But it would be a new background -- I could give you lots of authentic material."

"Thank you, you are very kind,"  (Get to gehenna out of this and write up your own confounded material.  Leave my creature alone -- I will not "make" him do anything.)

It will be seen that, although the writer's love is verily a jealous love, it is a jealousy for and not of his creatures.  He will tolerate no interference either with them or between them and himself.  But he does not desire that the creature's identity should be merged in his own, nor that his miraculous power should be invoked to wrest the creature from its proper nature.

....

Why Should Women Want to Know about Aristotle?

.....Take, for example, the very usual reproach that women nowadays always want to "copy what men do."  In that reproach there is a great deal of truth and a great deal of sheer, unmitigated and indeed quite wicked nonsense.  There are a number of jobs and pleasures which men have in times past cornered for themselves.  At one time, for instance, men had a monopoly on classical education.  When the pioneers of university training for women demanded that women should be admitted to the universities, the cry went up at once: "Why should women want to know about Aristotle?" The answer is NOT that all women would be the better for knowing about Aristotle -- still less, as Lord Tennyson seemed to think, that they would be more companionable wives for their husbands if they did know about Aristotle -- but simply:  "What women want as a class is irrelevant.  I want to know about Aristotle.  It is true that most women care nothing about him, and a great many male undergraduates turn pale and faint at the thought of him -- but I, eccentric individual that I am, do want to know about Aristotle, and I submit that there is nothing in my shape or bodily functions which need prevent my knowing about him." [pages 26- 27]

-- more from, Are Women Human? by Dorothy L. Sayers, who wrote the excerpted essay in 1947

Farewell Dorothy L. Sayers

After reading the sound bite, "Farewell Rob Bell," I went back and read what John Piper said that Dorothy Sayers said.  It was his Dorothy Sayers soundbite, on hell, on the Hell, on The One True Hell, of course.   In this post, I'd like to look at that with you.

(But, in a quick parenthetical paragraph, let me also warn that pinning down Dorothy L. Sayers on Hell is a bit like pinning down Jesus on Hell.  What Sayers and Jesus said about men -- especially religious men -- mistreating women is much clearer and just as passionate as any of their teachings on Hell, we might agree.  Thus, the title of this post here really could have been:  "The Hells of Dorothy L. Sayers."  On that, I'll try to say more in a moment.  For now, we're listening again to John Piper.)

John Piper produced his Sayers essay on the web in May 2000 ["By John Piper. © Desiring God. Website: desiringGod.org"].  He entitled it, "Dorothy Sayers on Why Hell Is a Non-Negotiable."  He reproduced it for sale in his subsequent book Pierced by the Word: Thirty-One Meditations for Your Soul, which his publisher started marketing and then selling on September 11, 2003.

Piper opens the Sayers On Hell essay by saying, "Today belongs to the soundbite; tomorrow belongs to marketing; eternity belongs to the Truth."  Then he warns against "truths," and he reiterates, singularly, that his readers be inclined toward divine truth:   "O may God give us a humble, submissive love for the truth of God's word in the depth and fullness of it. "  Then he warns with the first of an accumulation of quotations:  first "God's word" twice "in the depth and fullness" of two verses from Paul.  The first verse is:  "The time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires."  After Paul, Piper has another man teach his readers:  "Clark Pinnock, a Canadian theologian who still calls himself an evangelical."  This, then, prepares readers for Sayers.

What Piper says that Sayers says is this:

Dorothy Sayers, who died in 1957, speaks a necessary antidote to this kind of abandonment of truth.

There seems to be a kind of conspiracy, especially among middle-aged writers of vaguely liberal tendency, to forget, or to conceal, where the doctrine of Hell comes from. One finds frequent references to the "cruel and abominable mediaeval doctrine of hell," or "the childish and grotesque mediaeval imagery of physical fire and worms." . . .
But the case is quite otherwise; let us face the facts. The doctrine of hell is not " mediaeval": it is Christ's. It is not a device of "mediaeval priestcraft" for frightening people into giving money to the church: it is Christ's deliberate judgment on sin. The imagery of the undying worm and the unquenchable fire derives, not from "mediaeval superstition," but originally from the Prophet Isaiah, and it was Christ who emphatically used it. . . . It confronts us in the oldest and least "edited" of the gospels: it is explicit in many of the most familiar parables and implicit in many more: it bulks far larger in the teaching than one realizes, until one reads the Evangelists [gospels] through instead of picking out the most comfortable texts: one cannot get rid of it without tearing the New Testament to tatters. We cannot repudiate Hell without altogether repudiating Christ. (Dorothy Sayers, A Matter of Eternity, ed. Rosamond Kent Sprague [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1973], p. 86)

I would only add: There are many other things which, if abandoned, will also mean the eventual repudiation of Christ. It is not out of antiquarian allegiance that we love the truth - even the hard ones. It is out of love to Christ - and love to the people that only the Christ of truth can save.

Longing to love people with the truth,

Pastor John

© Desiring God

And that's it.  Truth wins.
----
Well, that's almost it. As you might have guessed, there's more. Dorothy L. Sayers wrote much on Hell. Famously, she translated Dante's Inferno, which she rendered Hell.  Yes, of course, she was interested in  frequent references to the "cruel and abominable mediaeval doctrine of hell."  She was also interested in fiction of all kinds, writing much herself.

For example, here's from one of Sayers's novels:

"For God's sake, old man, do what you can to put the thing right before next assizes.  If you don't, I'll never forgive you.  Damn it, you don't want to hang the wrong person, do you?--especially a woman and all that."

"Have a fag," said Parker.  "You're looking quite wild about the eyes.  What have you been doing with yourself?  I'm sorry if we've got the wrong pig by the ear, but it's the defense's business to point out where we're wrong, and I can't say they put up a very convincing show."

"No, confound them.  Biggy did his best, but that fool and beast Crofts gave him no materials at all.  Blast his ugly eyes!  I know the brute thinks she did it.  I hope he will fry in hell and be served up with cayenne pepper on a redhot dish!"

"What eloquence!" said Parker, unimpressed.  "Anybody would think you'd gone goopy over the girl."

What is interesting about this particular quotation from Sayers's novel, (Strong Poison, page 56) is how she's having men reference Hell.  It's clear to any reader of Jesus's gospels that she's riffing off of them.  You got the allusions to "that fool" and before that to "ugly eyes" - didn't you?  Jesus said that any man who called his brother fool would go to Hell; Jesus also said that any man who lusted, even with one ugly eye, after a woman would go to Hell too.  And here's a guy, a man, a character in some of Sayers's fiction with a farewell hope of hot hell for someone else who is mishandling the truth.  It's soundbites and soundbites about soundbites and the art of persuasion of men.  So has John Piper gone goopy over Dorothy Sayers?

What Piper doesn't say about the woman Dorothy L. Sayers is what she said about the hell that religious men put women in on earth.  But since we're already risking accumulating teachers and cherry picking quotations as soundbites for truths and fictions, as if love wins, then we might as well listen a little more to Ms. Sayers.  Just a warning:  the following won't tickle your ears much; it doesn't sound too much like a CBMW or a John Piper soundbite.

Here's one of her hells - one of the true truths of Dorothy L. Sayers - who complains about what men, religious men, have said about women:

      Women are not human.  They lie when they say they have human needs:  warm and decent clothing; comfort in the bus; interests directed immediately to God and His universe, not intermediately through any child of man.  They are far above man to inspire him, far beneath him to corrupt him; they have feminine minds and feminine natures, but their mind is not one with their nature like the minds of men; they have no human mind and no human nature.  "Blessed be God," says the Jew [a man of course], "that hath not made me a woman."

       God, of course, may have His own opinion, but the Church [of Christian men of course] is reluctant to endorse it.  I think I have never heard a sermon preached on the story of Martha and Mary that did not attempt, somehow, to explain away its text.  Mary's, of course, was the better part--the Lord said so, and we must not precisely contradict Him.  But we will be careful not to despise Martha.  No doubt, He approved of her too.  We could not get on without her, and indeed (have paid lip-service to God's opinion) we must admit that we greatly prefer her.  For Martha was doing a really feminine job, whereas Mary was just behaving like any other disciple, male or female; and that is a hard pill to swallow.

       Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross.  They had never known a man like this Man -- there never has been such another.   A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them as either "The women, God help us!" or "The ladies, God bless them!": who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unselfconscious.  There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything "funny" about woman's nature.

       But we might easily deduce it from His contemporaries, and from His prophets before Him, and from His Church to this day [of course mainly men].  Women are not human:  nobody shall persuade that they are human; let them say what they like, we will not believe it, though One rose from the dead.

(pages 66-69, Are Women Human)

Dorothy Sayers: Woman, Bachelor of Arts, Master of Arts, Patron Saint

Scot McNight tips us off to a new book by Chris Armstrong that tells "the stories within that Story of the Church."  One of those stories is that of Dorothy Sayers.  Her story joins the stories of other women and men who must, late in human history, struggle to recover women's God-given equality with men.

Here's a 2-paragraph clip from pages 188-89 (where Armstrong is quoting some from Barbara Reynolds's Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul):

     Meanwhile, in 1918, Sayers published her second book of poems with Blackwell, Catholic Tales and Christian Songs.  This book ... includes a short satirical play, The Mocking of Christ, which foreshadowed many of her later critiques of the poor state of the church in England.  In this play, "Christ is mocked daily by ecclesiastical wrangling, by insistence on certain details of ritual, by arguments about the choice of church music, by religiosity, trivialities, respectability, muscular Christianity, self-righteousness, war, sentimentality and the facile identification of Christianity with pagan faiths and Greek philosophy."

     This book sold little better than the first, and Sayers began considering doing a very different kind of writing.  The market for even badly written mysteries was growing.  And in detective fiction she could do what she loved at last, write.  And she could get paid enough so that she could stop receiving the modest allowance her father had been patiently sending her during her post-Oxford years.  It would be several years, however, before Sayers launched her career as a mystery writer.  In 1918 she spent time teaching in France.  Then in 1919 she heard that a bill had passed in Parliament that now allowed women to receive university degrees, with all the titles and privileges that had until then been reserved for male scholars.  "When she heard the good news, Dorothy shouted for joy.  Now she could become a real Bachelor of Arts and in fact, at the same time, a Master of Arts, or in the Latin, Domina."  This she did, at a grand ceremony in Oxford's Sheldonian Theater the following year, at which for the first time in university history, a group of women received the garb, regalia and titles associated with the B.A. and M.A. degrees.

Saving Christianity as Dorothy Sayers would have men do it

Yesterday, I linked to an essay by Frank Schaeffer.  Today, I want to offer a bit of an essay by Dorothy Sayers.

Both Schaeffer and Sayers address their contemporaries on the same topic:  an ugly side of Christianity.  Both share the same background:  preacher's kids.  Thus, as children of Christian ministers, these two rhetors (i.e., speakers and writers) criticize and critique Christianity from the inside:  as insiders.

For me, this is very interesting stuff.  What Schaeffer and Sayers have to say, the personal angst and authority with which they say it, and exactly how they say it is particularly interesting to me for the following reason:  I share this same background with these two.  My father is also a Christian minister (a pastor, a preacher, a missionary).  Thus, I greatly appreciate the logos, the ethos, and the pathos of the son of Francis A. Schaeffer and of the daughter of Henry Sayers.

I would, nonetheless, like us all to notice a difference between these two preacher's kids grown up:  one  "had to" live her life in her body, in the Christian church, sexed female.  ("Fe-male" is our marked English word, and how marked it has been in the English-speaking Christian church.)

Therefore perhaps, this same one, Dorothy Sayers, has been called the author of the "first feminist mystery novel":  Gaudy Night.   But if you read some of those Uncommon Opinions of hers, then you know how she understood how many people would mean the word feminism.  And if you have read her book, Are Women Human?, then you know how "irritated" the label, "feminist," made Sayers.  She insisted "that a woman is just as much an ordinary human being as a man, with the same individual preferences, and with just as much right to the tastes and preferences of an individual" (page 24).  She actually didn't like labels, didn't like being put into a box by labels.  And she didn't like women being put into boxes, especially not by religion, Jewish or Christian.  So she wrote to complain about the opinion of men, of Judaism and of the Church:

      Women are not human.  They lie when they say they have human needs:  warm and decent clothing; comfort in the bus; interests directed immediately to God and His universe, not intermediately through any child of man.  They are far above man to inspire him, far beneath him to corrupt him; they have feminine minds and feminine natures, but their mind is not one with their nature like the minds of men; they have no human mind and no human nature.  "Blessed be God," says the Jew [a man of course], "that hath not made me a woman."

       God, of course, may have His own opinion, but the Church [of Christian men of course] is reluctant to endorse it.  I think I have never heard a sermon preached on the story of Martha and Mary that did not attempt, somehow, to explain away its text.  Mary's, of course, was the better part--the Lord said so, and we must not precisely contradict Him.  But we will be careful not to despise Martha.  No doubt, He approved of her too.  We could not get on without her, and indeed (have paid lip-service to God's opinion) we must admit that we greatly prefer her.  For Martha was doing a really feminine job, whereas Mary was just behaving like any other disciple, male or female; and that is a hard pill to swallow.

       Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross.  They had never known a man like this Man -- there never has been such another.   A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronised; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them as either "The women, God help us!" or "The ladies, God bless them!": who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unselfconscious.  There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could possibly guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything "funny" about woman's nature.

       But we might easily deduce it from His contemporaries, and from His prophets before Him, and from His Church to this day [of course mainly men].  Women are not human:  nobody shall persuade that they are human; let them say what they like, we will not believe it, though One rose from the dead.

(pages 66-69, Are Women Human)

But this long quotation from Sayers is here in the post only because most of us readers know her best for her translation of Dante's incredible poetry.  It's one of the best translations ever, and Sayers's rendering of his verse may be why many of us know Dante.  Alinza Dale Stone, writing Maker and Craftsman, a wonderful biography of Sayers, notes that "She also was sure that when Hell did come out she would be attacked for treating Dante as a great storyteller instead of a superhuman 'sourpuss'" (page 141).  If you know Sayers's story among men, then you get that certainty of the attack, which did come against her.  So when Sayers critiques the church of her father(s), it goes something more like this (from "The Other Six Deadly Sins" in the concluding pages, 82-85, of Creed or Chaos):

        But the 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....

        The Greeks feared above all things the state of mind they called hubris--the inflated spirits that come with overmuch success.  Overweening in men called forth, they thought, the envy of the gods.  Their theology may seem to us a little unworthy, but with the phenomenon itself and its effects they were only too well acquainted.  Christianity, with a more rational theology, traces hubris back to the root-sin Pride, which places man instead of God at the centre of gravity and so throws the whole structure of things into the ruin called Judgment....

Human happiness is a by-product, thrown off in man's service of God.  And incidentally, let us be very careful how we preach that "Christianity is necessary for the building of a free and prosperous post-war world."  The proposition is strictly true, but to put it that way may be misleading, for it sounds as though we proposed to make God an instrument in the service of man.  But God is nobody's instrument....

         "Cursed be he that trusteth in man," says Reinhold Niebuhr "even if he be pious man or, perhaps, particularly if he be pious man."  For the besetting temptation of the pious man is to become the proud man:  "He spake this parable unto certain which trusted in themselves that they were righteous."

         My Lord Bishop--Ladies and Gentlemen--it has been my privilege to suggest to you that in your work for the Moral Welfare of this nation you will be doing a great thing if you can persuade the people that the Church is actively and anxiously concerned not with one kind of sin alone, but with seven sins, all of which are deadly, and not least with those which Caesar sanctions and of which the world approves....