Subversive

Christ, Culture, and the Shocking Dorothy L. Sayers

Crystal Downing

• Publisher: Broadleaf Books
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781506462752
• eBook ISBN: 9781506462769
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

Known for her bestselling detective novels, Dorothy L. Sayers lived a fascinating, groundbreaking life as a novelist, feminist, Oxford scholar, and important influence on the spiritual life of C.S. Lewis. This pioneering woman not only forged a literary career for herself but also spoke about faith and culture in revolutionary ways as she addressed the evergreen question of to what extent faith should hold on to tradition and to what extent it should evolve with a changing culture. Thanks to her unmatched wisdom, prophetic tone, and insistent strength, Dorothy Sayers is a voice that we cannot afford to ignore.

Providing a blueprint for bridge-building in contemporary, polarizing contexts, Subversive shows how Sayers used edgy, often hilarious metaphors to ignite new ways to think about Christianity, shocking people into seeing the truth of ancient doctrine in a new light. Urging readers to reassess interpretations of the Bible that impede the cause of Christ, Sayers helps twenty-first-century Christians navigate a society increasingly suspicious of evangelical vocabularies and find new ways to talk and think about faith and culture. Ultimately, she will inspire believers, on both the right and the left, to evaluate how and why their language perpetuates divisive certitude rather than the hopeful humility of faith, and will show us all a better way forward.

4

The Subversive Mind of the Maker

Rather than a mind for making money, Sayers had a mind for making change. Thus far we have focused on the Why of change, first in terms of Sayers’s changing profession, both of her faith and in her career; next by considering her commitment to handing over truth. Subversive now turns to Sayers’s sense of the How: the practice of making change, both for Christ and in culture.

The How of things was always very important to Sayers, perhaps explaining her success as an author of detective fiction. In her introduction to Great Short Stories of Detection, Mystery, and Horror (1929), she explains that, of the three questions key to solving a crime—Who? How? Why?—the How of mysterious action “offers most scope for surprise and ingenuity.”^[1] This chapter explores Sayers’s insights about the subversive power of surprise and ingenuity: the How of Christian change. As always, be forewarned: Sayers tends to shock people by the way she maintains ancient truth by handing it over to new expressions.

A Zeal for Change

Sayers closes the play that changed her life, The Zeal of Thy House, with an angel praising the God of all creation: “Praise Him that He hath made man in His own image, a maker and craftsman like Himself.”^[2] These words are far more subversive than they may at first appear. Unlike Christians who seek to preserve the status quo or even return to the past, the angel’s praise suggests that humans are most like God when they create something new.

Sayers bases this subversive idea on her interpretation of the imago Dei: Latin for “image of God.” As recounted in the first chapter of the Bible,

God created humankind in his image,

In the image of God [imago Dei] he created them;

Male and female he created them. (Genesis 1:27)

Sayers would then have us note the context in which the imago Dei is proclaimed: Genesis chapter one, which presents God not as lawgiver, not as judge, not as redeemer, but as creator. In fact, some scholars translate the self-describing term God gave to Moses from the burning bush as “I create what I create” (Exodus 3:14).^[3] If humans are created in the image of God, then creativity must fulfill the imago Dei. It makes perfect sense.

But it is the How of this concept that shows Sayers’s commitment to both creativity and Christ. For Sayers proceeds to suggest that creativity is trinitarian, like the God of Christianity. Reinforcing the belief that the universe was created by a Trinity, she has the angel at the end of Zeal pronounce that “every work of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.”^[4] Sayers explains what she means by having the angel name the threefold work of human creativity Creative Idea, Creative Energy, and Creative Power, thus mirroring the three-in-one of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

It’s easiest to understand what she means with the visual aid of a triangle. Just as a triangle has three angles in one form, so the Trinity has three persons in one substance, as in the diagram that follows.

Mirroring this image is the second triangle below: Idea parallels the place of Father God; we see Energy at the Son of God angle; and at the Spirit’s angle appears Power. In the center of the triangle is written imago Dei. In other words, the mind of the human maker mirrors the Mind of the Divine Maker.

Professional theologians were amazed by Sayers’s unusual—some would say subversive—insight. In fact, it was an influential British theologian who, after reading The Zeal of Thy House, suggested that Sayers expand on her trinitarian view of creativity. With his encouragement, she published a book-length study called The Mind of the Maker (1941), which outlines how, by paying attention to one’s own creative process, a person can become aware of the three interdependent elements that are all part of any one creative project: a process that reinforces the essential doctrine, finalized centuries after the resurrection, that God, in whose image we are created, is three-in-one.

Creative Examples

For a simple, down-home example, think of a stay-at-home father who creates a healthy new recipe for his fussy children: first he has the Idea for a nutritious casserole they might eat, an Idea inseparable from the Energy manifest when he conceptualizes what ingredients he will use and then proceeds to mix the ingredients together. Power is manifest when the father tastes his own creation, perhaps making changes to guarantee it will entice his children. The three are all part of one work of creativity. (I give this example with a nod to Sayers’s husband, who was the chef of their home, at least during the first decade of their marriage. When he published a Gourmet’s Book of Food and Drink in 1935, he placed on his dedication page the words, “To My Wife, Who can make an Omelet.”)

What Sayers made was books, not recipes. Hence, she explained her theology of creativity through what she knew best. For her, a creative project is composed of 1) The Book as You Think It, which is the originating Idea; 2) The Book as You Write It, giving Energy to your Idea by incarnating it on the page; 3) The Book as You and They Read It, generating Power as you reread and revise, a Power that spreads as more and more readers respond to the spirit of your Idea incarnated through your words.^[5] Sayers makes clear, however, that this does not imply a linear process. As with the Trinity, all three components are simultaneously part of the work, mutually interacting with one another in the act of creation. After all, as any creative writer will tell you, the Energy of writing down an Idea on the page makes it tangible, enabling the original Idea to expand its reach due to the Power generated when the author herself, by reading and revising her own incarnated Idea, actively develops it: the three are one during the act of creation.

Nevertheless, for both the chef and the author, creation is a step-by-step process, as illustrated by the Genesis account. After all, Omnipotent Triune God could have created everything in one Big Bang of glory. Instead, the opening chapter of the Bible emphasizes that creation happens over time, symbolically identifying each step with a new “day.” The imago Dei, though three-in-one, also functions temporally.

While developing her theory about the imago Dei, Sayers was guided by the description of Christ at the start of John’s Gospel: “All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being” (1:3). Without the second Person of the Trinity, nothing comes into being. It reminds me of the many people I encountered in southern California who told me they had a great idea for a screenplay, as though to convince me of their creativity. But without giving Energy to their creative Ideas, they failed to bring their screenplays into being. And many screenplays that did come into being failed to generate the third component of the Creative Trinity: Power. Without the Power to attract any attention whatsoever, many screenplays languish in a drawer or on a thumb drive: an incomplete work of creation. Sayers therefore suggests two definitions of “work” in The Mind of the Maker: the action of work (creative working) and the work as a finished product of creativity.^[6]

How, then, might The Mind of the Maker speak to those of us who are neither gourmet chefs nor bestselling authors? I can imagine two opposite reactions to Sayers’s “curious” book, as she repeatedly called it. First are those who might humbly say, “I do not have a creative bone in my body; I can’t cook up a new recipe, let alone write a screenplay.” Second are those who might shout with excitement, “This is exactly what I believe! Christians need to support creative people who can communicate the Gospel message through the arts!” Sayers would respond to the first with encouragement, the second with caution.

A Zeal for Imagination: G. K. Chesterton

Without a doubt, works of imagination can change the way people think. Sayers would offer as examples authors who altered how she responded to Christianity. In 1954, when a distinguished scientist asked her about her faith, she explained the importance of G. K. Chesterton’s creativity to her thought processes. Describing herself as “a sullenly unreceptive adolescent,” not at all “religious by nature,” Sayers states that she might well have turned into a Logical Positivist if not for Chesterton.^[7]

Logical positivism broke onto the philosophical scene in the late 1920s, just as Sayers was establishing her reputation as creator of the decidedly non-Christian Peter Wimsey. Later called logical empiricism, logical positivism held that only empirically verifiable statements, along with logical proofs, can be considered true. This concept clearly dovetails with Sayers’s creation of a ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Murder of God
• The Shock of the New
• Religious Shopping and Exchange
• The Betrayal of Tradition, the Tradition of Betrayal
• The Subversive Mind of the Maker
• The Politics of Religion, the Religion of Politics
• A Brief Subversive Conclusion
• Notes
• Index