The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1 by Dorothy L. Sayers
My clerk Swilltosh (who is getting too big for his boots) has the impertinence to say I was trying to be too clever: I should have encouraged the patient’s laziness so as make her drop the man’s original letter into the waste-paper basket. I have pointed out to him that my first duty is to my own patient - why should I let her get off with one trivial act of sloth when I have the opportunity of raising a great weedy growth of pride, vainglory, wrath and hypocrisy on the opportunity provided? He maintains, further, that the mistake was to permit any activity at all, since all activity is borrowed from the Enemy and can be turned to His advantage. Surely this is heresy: otherwise Sloth would be the greatest of all the sins. Anyhow, I refuse to admit that the Enemy can, as He claims, turn Evil into Good. That is just one of His propaganda boasts. It doesn’t make sense. If it did, what are we Devils for? I do not like to hear these opinions bandied about Down Below – a very nasty spirit of defeatism seems to be getting about among the younger fiends, which I can only attribute to Fifth-column activities.
The Devil’s Telephone Number.
So – as I said, the trouble is sheer lack of Planning and failure to cooperate. I have been informed that this wretched Atheist’s Tempter has been complaining about the episode. I must enter a protest. It is all his fault. Why did he not get into touch with me at the time? Why did he not warn me that the fool was merely spoiling for a fight and asked nothing better than a slap in the face? Something has gone very wrong with our Intelligence. It’s no good telling me that all our best Tempters have been called up for war-work; the defence of civil atheism is a reserved occupation. What is the use of winning victories in the exterior field of physical violence, if we are going to collapse on the Home Front? I beg that you will take this matter in hand immediately; otherwise I shall see to it that a question is asked in the Lower House. You may think the opinion of a mere Tempter in private practice of very little importance; if so, I can only say that the Civil Service Mentality should be left in the Human world, where it belongs: we have no use for it Down Here.
Yours, &c.
SLUCKDRIB
Thus from my Attendant. I confess it had not previously occurred to me that the corruption of all the vices by righteousness must cause as much theological wrangling there as the corruption of the virtues by original sin does here. Meanwhile, I am left with the Atheist on my hands. I do not want him. I have no use for him. I have no missionary zeal at all.8 God is behaving with His usual outrageous lack of scruple. The man keeps on bothering about Miracles; he thinks Hall Caine’s Life of Christ is the last word in Biblical criticism, and objects violently to the doctrine of Sin, the idea of a Perfect Man without any sex-life, and the ecclesiastical tyranny of the B.B.C. He is in the Home Guard, can’t spell, and has a mind like a junk-shop. If he reads any of the books I have recommended, he will write me long and disorderly letters about them. It will go on for years. I cannot bear it. Two of the books are yours9 – I only hope they will rouse him to fury. Then I shall hand him on to you. You like souls. I don’t. God is simply taking advantage of the fact that I can’t stand intellectual chaos, and it isn’t fair. Anyhow, there aren’t any up-to-date books about Miracles.10
The Hound of Heaven
People have stopped arguing about them. Why? Has Physics sold the pass? or is it merely that everybody is thinking in terms of Sociology and international Ethics? Please tell me what to do with this relic of the Darwinian age, who is wasting my time, sapping my energies and destroying my soul.
Yours indignantly,
Dorothy L. Sayers
1 C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide, Walter Hooper, Harper Collins, 1996, pp. 33–34.
2 C. S. Lewis did not contribute a book to “Bridgeheads” but, as Walter Hooper suggests (p. 34), “much of what Dorothy L. Sayers asked him to say probably went into the character of the unhappily married Jane Studdock in That Hideous Strength”.
3 i.e. The Man Born to be King.
4 i.e. presumably Screwtape.
5 i.e. Sluckdrib. See the signature to the Memorandum.
6 This is a private joke going back to her childhood. The numbers 7734 turned upside down spell HELL. When she was 13, a young man named Cyril Hutchinson, who used to visit Bluntisham with his parents, told her it was the devil’s telephone number. (See Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1899–1936, letter to Ivy Shrimpton, 3 September 1907, p. 7.) It is touching to find her, a month from her 50th birthday, thinking back to her flirtation with Cyril Hutchinson at the age of 13.
7 See letter to L. T. Duff, 10 May 1943.
8 Nevertheless the correspondence continued for at least another year and she even permitted him to call on her twice.
9 Broadcast Talks and The Problem of Pain. See her letter to L. T. Duff, 10 May 1943 and accompanying list.
10 C. S. Lewis’ book, Miracles, was not published until 1947. He had preached a sermon on the subject in November 1942. A short version was printed in The Guardian, 2 October 1942. This was followed by an article in two instalments, “Dogma and the Universe”, published in The Guardian, 19 and 26 March 1943. Walter Hooper thinks that D. L. S.’ observation that “there aren’t any up-to-date books about Miracles” may have encouraged Lewis to continue. (See pp. 343–344 of C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide.) In his reply to this letter, dated 17 May 1943, Lewis said, “I’m starting a book on Miracles”.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE REV. G. H. CROSSLAND1
18 May 1943
My good Sir,
I am quite well aware that wine, like tea and coffee, is poison when taken in excess.
It must be a great grief to you that Our Lord should have been so ill-informed, or so lacking in common, moral, and Christian sense, as to use it both for His sacrament and for His pleasure. What a pity He had not the advantage of being able to study Miss Baker’s pamphlet on the subject! However, since I am a Christian and not a Mohammedan, I shall make so bold as to follow His example, despite any claims made on behalf of the Free Churches to know better than God Almighty.…
Yours faithfully,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 A Wesleyan Minister of Tunbridge Wells.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO L. T. DUFF
16 June 1943
Dear Mr Duff,
Thank you very much for your letter. I am sure you will forgive me if I answer it this time rather briefly. If I were to deal with all your points exhaustively, I should have to write a small book, so I will leave you to deal with the other twenty-one books I have recommended. I think you will find that most of the points are dealt with in one or other of them.
But I do want to say just one thing. The “Gospel” or “Good News” is first and foremost a story – a “news-story” about something that happened. And it is important to remember just what the story is. It is not a story about a very good man who taught a good way of life and was killed, like Socrates. The story told by the Christian Faith is that God the living energy that made and sustains the universe – once showed Himself openly in earthly history in the body and mind of a man; that, except for a few people who loved Him and learned to recognize Him for what He was, man hated God at sight and killed Him; but that death could not hold that living energy, which showed Its power by again reanimating the material form which It had made (as It made all things), before It passed out of human history into the eternity which It had never quitted.
If you remember exactly what the story is, you may see that your first objection cannot be answered in exactly the terms in which you have raised it. God has never said that if we believe in Him unpleasant things will not happen to us in this world. What He did was to suffer those things Himself. God-in-History prayed to God-in-Eternity that, if it were possible, the suffering might be avoided. But it was not possible, and He went through with it. The answer to the prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane was not the cancelling of the Crucifixion, bu
So that “prayer” which is just a childish repetition of “Don’t want”, or a pagan incantation to drive away disaster, is not prayer in the Christian sense at all. A lot of it is just nonsense-talk: “Please God don’t let anything have any real consequences.” And of course it is quite futile. The world is so made that things really happen and have real consequences, and the only way of altering that would be to unmake the world. In this world of time, Christ promises nothing but “blood, toil, tears and sweat”2 – and “in the world of eternity life unlimited”.
I am sending you a short article of mine,3 in which “the story” is boiled down to its bones, so to speak; because so often in arguing and explaining, we lose sight of what the story actually is. It is the story of how man sent God to the gallows. Anything less startling than that isn’t historic Christianity at all it is only Christianity-and-water. The reason why God and man behaved like that has to do with sin, and I won’t attempt to cope with that subject now – you will find it in the books I have suggested, especially in Whale’s Christian Doctrine and Lewis’ Problem of Pain. By the way, Mr Lewis has sent me an article of his on Miracles4 which he hopes may come in useful. Please let me have it back some time, because it is the only copy I possess. Of course, in reading it, you have to remember the story – that Christ is God, the life and power that animates the whole universe. You can’t fit the doctrine to a totally different kind of story.
Thank you for letting me know your background. It is pretty much what your previous letters led me to expect, and I think the choice of books is as good as I can make for you. What I find when reading a lot of books on a subject like theology is that one may wade through a lot of stuff, finding it meaningless or disagreeing with every word of it, and that then, suddenly, some phrase strikes one and one says, “Good Lord, yes! that means something, and now I begin to see what all the rest of the verbiage was about”. And that means that one has found a way into the subject – the gap in the perimeter, so to speak, and when one is once inside one can fan out and mop up all the other positions from the back. But no two people find exactly the same way in, and that’s why recommending books is such a job. You may lead one person up to what (for his equipment) is an absolutely unscalable intellectual escarpment, and only discover too late that he could have gone in quite easily over what (to you) looks like a quite impassable emotional bog. So, once again, if the first book you try does not, in the charming Quaker phrase, “speak to your condition”, don’t waste time getting angry with it, but put it aside and tap round the defences for a more assailable spot.
Of course, if none of it, after careful consideration, seems to make sense, you can fall back on your defensive line of “we are as we are and we can’t help anything” but that doesn’t seem a very cheerful doctrine, and it has the (to me) fatal defect of making nonsense of our ingrained sense of responsibility. Even the “blood and tears” of Christianity is more stimulating than that!
And you say you sometimes think that man may be just a disease in the universe. So, after all, you feel that there is something not quite right about man. Christianity is a trifle less pessimistic than you are. It doesn’t say that man is the disease, but that he is diseased through and through; and it adds that the disease is curable. But look! the moment you say: “There’s something wrong, there’s a disease, and it’s something to do with man” – then, it doesn’t matter two hoots what you call it, you have discovered what the Church means by sin. Never mind whether you thought that was what the Church meant or not – she may have expressed herself badly in your hearing. But that is it. Whatever you may think about “sin” as a theory, you have discovered it for yourself as a fact.
And of course man is made of the dust of the earth, subject to the same chemical and mechanical and biological laws [as] his fellow-creatures, and of course his conceit is overweening and his pride intolerable; Christianity will agree heartily with you, and has been saying the same thing in no measured terms for centuries. The only thing for which man has any cause to reverence himself is that he has been so made as to be (in the phrase of a great Christian father5) capax Dei, “capable of God”. However, I won’t go on about this – already I have been much less “brief” than I meant to be. I will now leave you to wrestle with the angel of theology!
Please don’t thank me for making out the book-list. I only hope you may find something there that “says something to you”. If you do, I should be very grateful to know which book it is that has in any way stimulated or interested or cleared anything up for you, because people so often ask what they shall read on this subject and sometimes one doesn’t know what sort of thing they will like.
Yours sincerely,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
1 Who now rejoice in my sufferings for you and fill up that which remaineth of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for His body’s sake, which is the church. (Colossians, chapter 1, verse 24)
2 See letter to B. E. Nicolls, 12 May 1943, note.
3 “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged”, published in pamphlet form by Hodder and Stoughton, 2 June 1938.
4 In his reply dated 17 May 1943, Lewis asked “Is the enclosed any help?” This was followed by a note dated 20 May: “Keep the magazine if it simplifies the matter, for I have the MS.” This may have been his sermon on Miracles, published in the church magazine (the Church of St. Jude on the Hill, London).
5 There are a number of uses of this phrase recorded in the Patrologia Latina. The most likely source is Hilary of Poitiers (315–367), who wrote the first Latin treatise on the Trinity (De Trinitate): “Si in judicii severitatem capax illa Dei Virgo ventura est…” (If that Virgin God-bearer is to come to the strictness of Judgement…).
Correspondence between D. L. S. and Mr Duff continued but not all the letters are extant. The continuation, between March and August 1944, will be found in the following volume.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO THE REV. G. H. CROSSLAND
16 June 1943
Dear Sir,
You are extraordinarily evasive. Will you kindly either keep to the point or cease from controversy.
I will put to you two questions, and will trouble you to answer them in two words, or not at all.
1. “The Son of Man came eating and drinking and ye say, Behold a gluttonous man and a wine-bibber.”1
Do you agree with this
2. If the answer to the above is “Yes”, then please state in one word whether you consider that Our Lord,
in drinking wine, showed Himself to be
(a) wicked
or
(b) ignorant
It is neither presumptuous, heretical, nor infidel to be an abstainer. But if you believe that Jesus was wholly God, then to condemn His conduct is presumptuous. If you believe that He was not wholly God, but only partly or in some respects divine, you are a heretic. If you think He was not God at all, you are an infidel.
Yours faithfully,
[Dorothy L. Sayers]
Pressure of work prevented me from dealing with your letter earlier.
1 Luke, chapter 7, verse 34.
[24 Newland Street
Witham
Essex]
TO STORM JAMESON1
21 June 1943
Dear Miss Storm Jameson,
I have been meaning for a long time to write to you.
First to say how very sorry I was to hear about your sister, secondly to express my satisfaction that the book2 had gone so well in America, and thirdly to tell you (in case you had not noticed it in the papers) that a centre3 for instructing intelligent professional people in the Christian religion has now in fact been opened at St. Anne’s Church House, 57A Dean Street, Soho. One of the incumbents, Fr. Pat McLaughlin, is a very energetic young priest, whom I know very well, and it will, I think, be run in a vigorous and lively manner. They are having lectures from time to time, and I am, in fact, speaking there myself on Thursday evening about the Theatre. They are also open all the time for anybody who wants to come and ask questions and so on. I meant to send you one of their leaflets, but have most unfortunately mislaid it, but if you are still interested you could easily get in touch with them. Their ‘phone number is Gerrard 5006.