The Seven Deadly Sins in the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers

Janice Brown

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781612778884
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

The impact of Dorothy L. Sayer's work is a powerful one. She was a gifted artist who worked in many genres and addressed many issues, but her achievement goes beyond creative skill and variety of range. What she consistently communicates about Sin—the basic problem of human existence—provides a core of content which evokes, as she believed artistic work should, a spiritual "response in the lively soul" (The Zeal of Thy House).Janice Brown examines Sayer's major works, beginning with her early poetry and moving through her works of fiction to the dramas, essays, and lectures written in the last years of her life. She illustrates how Sayers used popular genres to teach about sin and redemption, how she redefined the Seven Deadly Sins for the twentieth century, why she stopped writing mysteries, and her application of the concepts of sin and redemption to society as a whole.

1

Unpopular Opinions
Find a Popular Voice

Observing the agonized search for meaning in the world around her, Dorothy L. Sayers identified in a letter two troubling questions that relate to all of human life: “The questions which people chiefly ask at the moment are two: a) Why does everything we do go wrong and pile itself up into some ‘monstrous consummation’? and b) What is the meaning of all this suffering?” She went on to answer the two questions with three words: “The Christian answer to the first is, ‘Sin,’ and to the second, ‘Christ crucified.’”¹

Such answers are probably more unpopular today than they were in the 1940s. But Sayers did not bow to popular views. She defiantly called her first book of essays Unpopular Opinions, and she made no apologies for her bluntness on the subject of Sin.² Earlier in the same letter she observed that people “nowadays” do not regard themselves as “miserable sinners,” but that nonetheless “they are desperately aware that something frightful is wrong with the world.” Sayers responded to this dilemma by striving to bring into focus that sense of Sin that hovered in the peripheral vision of so many.

From the beginning to the end of her writing career, Dorothy L. Sayers was concerned with religious issues. Her early interest in medievalism and Christianity is apparent in the poetry she wrote in her twenties, and the translation and interpretation of Dante’s Divine Comedy was her consuming passion during the last years of her life. In spite of her impressive academic background, however, Sayers is best known as a writer of popular genres. In the middle decades of her literary career she became famous, first as a writer of detective fiction and then as a dramatist. She wrote continuously—short stories, detective novels, literary commentaries, familiar essays, plays, Christian apologetics, philosophical treatises, and personal letters. Many of her recurring themes, such as the importance of work and the nature of creativity, are not religious issues in the obvious sense. Nor are her fictional works particularly religious in tone or content. Her approach to every subject, however, is supported by a world-view that is fundamentally Christian.

Sayers was naturally pleased by the success of her detective fiction, but popularity with those who held secular humanistic views meant little to her. In one of her early detective novels, Unnatural Death (1927), the immorality of the crime is explained in the context of the nature of Sin itself. The Reverend Mr. Tredgold tells Lord Peter Wimsey that “the sin … lies much more in the harm it does the killer than in anything it can do to the person who is killed,” and that “Sin is in the intention, not the deed. That is the difference between divine law and human law” (ch. 19).

In her 1935 review of G. K. Chesterton’s The Scandal of Father Brown for the Sunday Times it is apparent that Sayers’s views, even on whodunits, were tied to her philosophical base, which was Christianity.

Are the crimes to be real sins, or are they to be the mere gestures of animated puppets? Are we to shed blood or only sawdust? … And is the detective to figure only as the arm of the law or as the hand of God? So far as artistic unity goes, it does not matter at all which alternative we choose, provided that we stick to it; but when we look at the whole scope of our work, we shall see that it matters a great deal. If we wipe out God from the problem we are in very real danger of wiping out man as well. Unless we are prepared to bring our murderers to the bar of Eternity, we may construct admirable jig-saw puzzles, but we shall certainly never write a “Hamlet.” And we owe Mr. Chesterton a heavy debt in that, with very great courage in a poor and materialistic period, he planted his steps firmly upon the more difficult path, and showed us how to enlarge the boundaries of the detective story by making it deal with real death and real wickedness and real, that is to say, divine judgement. (“Salute to Mr. G. K. Chesterton” 9)

In spite of the great range and versatility of her writing, Sayers’s lasting popularity is tied more closely to the character of her fictional hero, Lord Peter Wimsey, than to anything else. He starts out, in the first books, as little more than a worldly-wise Bertie Wooster with brains, and ends up, by the last books, as something approximating a Christian hero trying to save the world from war and a virtuous lord representing the highest ideals of English life. His character evolves over the ten novels,³ and his evolution parallels the growth of Sayers’s spiritual concerns. He becomes more complex, more introspective, and more intriguing to the reader. But what is the final outcome when a fantasy figure develops into a real human being, and when readers of whodunits are prompted to contemplate serious philosophical issues? In Sayers’s case the result was a marked change in direction as she moved to genres and subjects that allowed her to express her “unpopular opinions” more emphatically.

Her religious convictions certainly became a more dominant part of her consciousness as the years went by, but there is much to connect her early books with those of her later years. Sayers was aware of the continuity of thought that prevailed throughout her work. In 1941 she could see the underlying principle that tied her earlier poems and novels to the works of her mature years:

And though he [the writer] may imagine for a moment that this fresh world [in his latest book] is wholly unconnected with the world he has just finished [in his previous book], yet if he looks back along the sequence of his creatures, he will find that each was in some way the outcome and fulfillment of the rest—that all his worlds belong to the one universe that is the image of his own Idea. I know it is no accident that Gaudy Night, coming towards the end of a long development in detective fiction, should be a manifestation of precisely the same theme as the play The Zeal of Thy House, which followed it and was the first of a series of creatures embodying a Christian theology. They are variations upon a hymn to the Master Maker; and now after nearly twenty years, I can hear in Whose Body? [her first novel] the notes of that tune sounding unmistakably under the tripping melody of a very different descant; and further back still, I hear it again, in a youthful set of stanzas in Catholic Tales.… [T]he end is clearly there in the beginning. (The Mind of the Maker 168–69)

One of Sayers’s greatest gifts was her ability to invigorate theology and relate it to common people. This is why she never lost her appeal as a writer, even though she turned from the popularity of detective fiction, and even though she pushed her Christian views harder than ever. She drew people in because she perceived theology not as a set of lofty abstractions, but as the spiritual basis of all human experience. She especially understood the concept of Sin and its philosophical and psychological implications for twentieth-century society as a whole. In a 1945 lecture on “The Faust Legend and the Idea of the Devil,” she defined Sin by explaining its relationship to free will and identified its root cause: “There is … along with the reality of God, the possibility of not-God.… The possibility of evil exists from the moment that a creature is made that can love and do good because it chooses and not because it is unable to do anything else. The actuality of evil exists from the moment that that choice is exercised in the wrong direction. Sin (moral evil) is the deliberate choice of the not-God. And Pride, as the Church has consistently pointed out, is the root of it” (5).

Sayers’s high regard for Christian dogma was solidly based on her knowledge of and respect for the wisdom of the past. She berates the “historic sense” in criticism that “encourages us to dismiss our forebears as the mere creatures of a period environment, and therefore wholly unlike us and irrelevant to us or to present realities” (Introduction to Purgatory 45).

It was not until her study of Dante’s Divine Comedy that Sayers probed directly and deeply into the medieval theology of the Seven Deadly Sins, but an awareness of these basic roots of sinfulness and of the medieval way of ordering them is apparent even in her earlier works. Barbara Reynolds, Sayers’s friend and biographer, has noted her ongoing interest in the concept of the Deadly Sins:

Long before she read Dante she had personified the ill doings of society in figures of the Seven Deadly Sins. They put in a brief appearance, as though for an audition for a morality play, at the end of her article “Christian Morality,” and they reappear in full panoply in the talk “The Other Six Deadly Sins.” … When Dorothy came upon [the Sins] in Dante’s poem, she recognised, there drawn by a master hand, what she herself had depicted in a lesser degree. Her mind leapt in creative response. Here was the greatest Christian poet saying for her, with immense power, what she had been trying to tell people through the years of the war. (The Passionate Intellect 105)

Writing near the end of her life, Sayers describes the Deadly Sins—Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust—as “the fundamental bad habits of mind recognized and defined by the Church as the well-heads from which all sinful behavior ultimately springs” (Introduction to Purgatory 65). Because, from her youth, her mind had been steeped in orthodox Christianity, she had always presented human shortcomings in a way that reflected these seven “fundamental bad habits of mind.” Throughout her writing career she actually refocused this medieval concept, adapting it to the realities of twentieth-century life.

Her work especially depicts the seriousness and destructiveness of Pride.⁴ All of her major characters struggle with this Sin: Peter and Harriet in the Wimsey novels, William of Sens in The Zeal of Thy House, Faustus in The Devil to Pay, Judas in The Man Born to Be King, and Constantine in The Emperor Constantine. Most of these characters slowly and painfully come to terms with the fact that they can experience spiritual wholeness only by allowing themselves to be humbled.

Although Pride looms above all the rest, the other six Sins play significant roles throughout Sayers’s work. Avarice, or Covetousness, in the simplest sense, is frequently shown as a cause of crime, but Sayers also shows that the greed for power can be even more deadly than the greed for wealth and material things. She also shows that the commercial basis of modern society is a form of Avarice that eats away at the spiritual quality of human life. Envy and Wrath are presented in Sayers’s work as root causes not only of crime but also of many failures in human relationships, particularly marriage. The Sin of Sloth is not significant in the detective novels, but it is the Sin that Sayers attacks most frequently in her later works. She frequently rebukes carelessness in work; but because she sees this Sin as a spiritual problem much more than a physical one, she condemns even more strongly the Sloth that manifests itself as laziness of mind. She takes a more forgiving attitude toward Gluttony and Lust, but her treatment of them, especially Lust, is often very probing. Her de-emphasis on the evil of these two Sins is very possibly a reaction to the fact that hedonism (the broader form of Gluttony) and sexual immorality (Lust) were the vices that religious people traditionally tended to overemphasize. She does not deny that they are serious roots of sinfulness, but her works present these warmhearted Sins of the flesh as less destructive than the more spiritual, coldhearted Sins.

A thorough discussion of the Seven Deadly Sins necessitates a consideration of the Christian Virtues of which the Sins are opposites.⁵ These Virtues are the spiritual qualities that define the tension between good and evil. Pride despises Humility, Envy is in conflict with Mercy,⁶ Wrath allows no place to Peace, Sloth is in direct opposition to Zeal, Avarice refuses to entertain Liberality, Gluttony rejects Temperance, and Lust scorns Chastity.⁷

In Sayers’s earlier work—the poetry, the short stories, and the first nine mysteries—the possibility of redemption is implicit, but it is not part of the central focus. In her later work, from Gaudy Night onward, the defeat of Sin in the life of the individual becomes more and more central in the thematic pattern. Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon show, particularly, the application of the concepts of Sin and redemption in the attempt to create a modern marriage that is a true partnership.

Dorothy L. Sayers wrote very successfully on these subjects because she understood them. Readers may not like to be told they are sinners, but they recognize psychological realism when they see it. Sayers wrote about what she knew, and she knew Sin to be a personal reality with which people struggle daily. Barbara Reynolds has, in Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul, illustrated the many ways in which Sayers’s writing grew out of her life experiences. Yet her work is essentially distinct and separate from her life. The subject of this study is “The Seven Deadly Sins in the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers.” At certain points it will be appropriate to consider how her life experiences (particularly her early religious training) influenced her writing, but, in the interest of maintaining my chosen focus, I will refrain from speculating about the private battles with besetting Sins in which Dorothy L. Sayers must, like all of us, have engaged.

In her depiction of Sin in her fictional characters, and in her discussion of Sin in her nonfiction, Sayers recognizes the growth in Virtue that occurs when the pull of the Deadly Sins is resisted. Sin is easy; Virtue is hard. Both are costly. The conflict between them has always made a good story, and Dorothy L. Sayers was first and foremost a superb storyteller.

2

Why Seven? Why Deadly?

The Development of a
Religious and Literary Concept

The concept of Seven Deadly Sins is a very old one.¹ It existed in embryonic form in pre-Christian times and emerged as a complete concept in the monasteries of the fourth and fifth centuries. The full flowering of its popularity, however, occurred in the religious and secular literature of the later Middle Ages.

What medieval theologians developed was a list of basic or root Sins which were, by the fourteenth century, given the label Deadly. The earlier label was Cardinal,² and it was, in fact, a more accurate one since these Sins are not examples of extraordinary evil, but instead are the commonplace, fundamental Sins of the heart out of which overt sinful behavior arises.

Although the earliest treatments of a particular list of Sins applied to monastic life, later discussions of the concept were broader, and relevant to the laity as well. The first churchmen known to have written on the subject were the Desert Fathers. One of these was Evagrius of Pontus who, late in the fourth century, took up monastic seclusion in the Egyptian desert. “Evagrius made the Sins a basic part of his moral teachings, and conceived of them as the basic sinful drives against which a monk had to fight” (Bloomfield 57).

Evagrius’s list contains eight Sins: Gluttony (Gula), Lust (Luxuria), Avarice (Avaritia), Sadness (Tristitia), Anger (Ira), Sloth (Acedia), Vainglory (Vana gloria), and Pride (Superbia). This differs from the later forms of the list in that it includes Sadness, omits Envy, and includes a secondary form of pride—Vainglory.

Several decades after Evagrius, a pupil of his named Cassian further developed the concept in a number of important respects. Cassian emphasized that each of the eight Sins develops from the preceding one, and he introduced the symbolic image of a tree and its roots, which was to become a popular way of envisioning the interrelation between the Sins. Superbia was dealt with at the end of his list, but it was regarded as the root of all the other Sins.

Like Evagrius, Cassian put the Sins of the flesh, Luxuria (Lust) and Gula (Gluttony), in the first and second positions. The monastic life emphasized achieving holiness by living on a minimum of food and by suppressing bodily drives, particularly sexual impulses. In the context of this lifestyle Gluttony and Lust are among the first Sins to be addressed, yet the struggle with them i...