The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Vol. 1

by Dorothy L. Sayers

  1 Identity unknown.

  2 Cf. her play The Just Vengeance.

  [24 Newland Street

  Witham

  Essex]

  TO THE REV. W. T. ROBINSON1

  27 November 1941

  Dear Mr. Robinson,

  Thank you for your letter. I am very much honoured by your choice of The Mind of the Maker as a study book for your group.

  I’m afraid I’m not very good at setting “examination-papers”, especially on social subjects.

  One question, however, I do feel ought to be discussed, and that is the whole question of “work”, and the connection and contrast between “employment” and “vocation”. I have dealt with this matter in one or two public speeches – not as yet available in print – and have outlined the question in the “Postscript” to The Mind of the Maker.2

  In particular, there is the question of the secular vocation, and the mutual responsibility between it and the Church. The complaint of the secular vocational worker against the Church has been very ably voiced by Michael de la Bedoyère3 in his book Christian Crisis… viz: the failure of the Church to respect the integrity of a secular vocation as such and to give it religious sanction. She thus contrives to separate man’s activities into work done specifically “to serve God” (“religious” activities), and work done for other ends; ignoring the religious obligation of the worker to the work itself – i.e. the service of God in the service of the work. I’m not putting this very clearly. I mean, allowing that “who sweeps a room as to God’s praise makes that and the action fine”,4 the primary act of “worship” involved is, not to sing hymns as you sweep, or to look on sweeping as a devotional act, but to sweep properly. In other words, unless the room is “made fine”, the action will not be fine and will not be worship.

  One aspect of this is the one I have touched on in the “Postscript” – the failure to demand that the work required of the citizen shall be “worth doing and well done”. I need not say any more about this – except, perhaps, one thing, which you might think it worth while to discuss. I believe it is much more right to teach people to “serve the work” than to “serve the community”. The latter phrase sounds more Christian and altruistic; but it leads to some very unfortunate results in practice:

  1. It is apt to be interpreted as: “to satisfy public demand”, and so lead to the production of things worthless and even harmful. If economics demands the mass-production of cheap trash, it is readily supposed that such production is justified, since it “satisfies public demand” for such things and also “creates employment” – a vicious circle.

  2. If a worker thinks of himself as “serving the community”, he will probably proceed to think that “the community” ought to serve him in return. The thing becomes reduced to an assertion of personal rights, on a system of “social contract” and barter and exchange. The corruption of egotism begins to work at once, and falsifies everything that is done. But to “serve the work” leaves less room for egotism; since the artefact has no obligation towards the artificer, but only the artificer to the artifact.

  3. In practice; to make any work with one eye on the audience does, in fact, tend to damage the integrity of the work. That is why books and plays written to please a public are so brittle and bad. If the work is good, it will (eventually) please the public by its goodness; but you can’t get that sort of goodness if you “take your eye off the ball”. There is a sort of fundamental insincerity about work produced for anything but its own sake.

  There is also the very important (as I think) matter of the specialization of labour. However satisfactory it may be economically, to keep one workman perpetually doing a single process, or to prevent a worker from transferring himself from one kind of work to another, the net result of this, in human terms, is that the worker gets no idea of the job as a whole, or of the connection between one kind of job and another, and is thus prevented from ever really “looking to the end of the work”. (A W.E.A.5 man told me the other day how dreadful it seemed to him that in the silk manufactory where he had worked most of his life, the girls on the looms never even saw the beautiful stuff they were producing. Another confirmed the delight and pride of some women employed on making naval equipment – I forget exactly what – on being taken to a war-ship and recognising their own work in the finished product, which they had never before seen.) Employers, of course, find it cheaper to run things on the one-man-one-process basis; but when, for the sake of speeding things up in war-time, or from a desire to give workers a more intelligent attitude to their work, they do try to shift workers about a bit, they complain that the Trade Unions are mulishly obstructive. This needs arguing out.

  I think, too, one might discuss whether “the crushing burden of armaments” is really any more crushing than the burden of making and marketing unwanted goods for the sole purpose of keeping up production and forcing surplus exports on countries that don’t want them, in order to keep world-markets going. (Peter Drucker’s End of Economic Man6 has something about this; also there’s that alarming little book Ouroboros by Garet Garrett7 in Kegan Paul’s Today and Tomorrow Series – as cogent now as when it was written. Also V. A. Demant’s essay in Christian Polity: “Nationalism and Internationalism”). – And query: Whether the war-time restrictions on consumption and compulsory saving etc, necessary for the production of armaments might not be borne with equal cheerfulness for the production of public works in peace-time, and if not, why not? And here again: if we were as much interested to produce the works of peace as the weapons of war, could we achieve some such end voluntarily, or must we be planned and compelled into it? (Note: that the production of weapons of war is obliged, to a great extent, to “serve the work”, because nothing but good work will stand up to the strain of battle. Is war-work, in that sense, more healthy than the merely commercial works of peace?)

  Apart from all this, there is the relation of religion to the arts. They are now hopelessly at loggerheads. Artists, on the whole, get from the Church no strong backbone of religious faith to direct and inspire their work. They are brought up, of course, on the same doctrinal pabulum as the common man, which is mostly vague and sloppy. The Church, knowing and caring nothing about the integrity of art per se, keeps on making feeble efforts to drag the artist away from serving his own work, to serving official religion; or else falls back on bad and wishy-washy “religious art”. (For note: if, e.g., a writer does happen to be writing books or plays with a strong Christian backbone, or is, on other evidence, known to be a Christian, the parson does not cooperate by urging people to read the books and see the plays, and so encourage the writer to go on producing them. No – he gets in the way of the writer’s work by hauling him off to address meetings, open church bazaars, preach sermons, and talk to young people – work for which the writer may be quite unfitted and for which, if he is to remain an honest workman, he has neither time nor energy. And note further: that the writer, by undertaking work for which he has no genuine vocation, damages his own powers; but if he tells the parson this, the parson always replies: “Think of how much good you will do and how you will be serving the community”. Which brings us back to the previous point about “serving the work” and “serving the community”. All this happens because official religion does not take secular vocation seriously; it is a special instance of this general question.)

  I’m afraid I have jotted all this down rather sketchily, but it may suggest some lines of argument.

  I feel very strongly about all this question of work and vocation, because it seems to me that the whole thing has got topsy-turvy, and that the planners of New Orders are starting from the wrong end. They so seldom bother about what work is to be done, or to what purpose; and “the worker” is coming to mean less and less somebody whose life is bound up in his work, and more and more somebody who uses his enforced labour as a political weapon – in fact, an instrument of “power politics” in the most truculent sense of the words. And I don’t like it. I
don’t like it at all.

  Yours sincerely,

  [Dorothy L. Sayers]

  1 Identity unknown.

  2 Postscript: “The Worth of the Work” (Methuen, 1941, pp. 177–184). D. L. S. here says that what distinguishes the artist from someone who works to live is the desire to see the fulfilment of the work. “As the author of Ecclesiasticus says, he ‘watches to finish the work’ …that is, he sees the end-product of his toil exactly as the artist always sees it…” (p. 179). D. L. S. quotes Ecclesiasticus also in The Zeal of Thy House, where parts of Chapter 39, verses 27 to 34 are sung as an interlude after the first scene.

  3 See letter to him, 7 October, note 1.

  4 From the poem by George Herbert, set as a hymn by Sandys, beginning “Teach me, my God and King”. The lines are misquoted; they should read: “Who sweeps a room, as for Thy laws Makes that and the action fine.”

  5 Workers’ Educational Association

  6 Published in 1939. D. L. S. recommends it in Begin Here, under “Books to Read”, p. 157.

  7 Ouroborus: or the Mechanical Extension of Mankind by Garet Garrett was first published in 1926. D. L. S. read it then and it increased her uneasiness about the advertising profession. In 1944 she wrote a Foreword to another book by Garet Garrett, A Time is Born (Basil Blackwell, Oxford, 1945), expressing views she had been putting forward in her letters during the early 1940s.

  [24 Newland Street

  Witham

  Essex]1

  28 November 1941

  I have started several times to write to you about the Theological Literature Association, and each time some other urgent matter has cropped up and interrupted me. It was not possible for me to attend the meeting in Oxford; but I hope things went well.

  I am in entire agreement with you about the urgent need both for readable books which present Christian doctrine in a form that can be assimilated by adult pagans, and for books to instruct the ignorant, whether children or adults. Quite apart from anything else, the unhappy “Lay Apostolate” are at present in a most harassing position. The hungry sheep who (for various reasons) refuse the official pabulum, baa round them insistently, and are fed only with the greatest difficulty from very insufficient material by these amateur shepherds. And it’s all very well for our bishops and pastors to encourage us with approving shouts – we still have to scratch for the stuff, cook it up and serve it out as best we can, to the peril of our souls and tempers, and at imminent risk of handing out a lot of poísonous weeds with it, in our haste and lack of preparation.

  One of our biggest difficulties is this: that so extreme is the public’s ignorance of what the accepted doctrine is, and so great its distrust of orthodoxy, that whenever we present it in assimilable form, we have to spend hours of time and pounds in postage-stamps explaining to correspondents that this is not a a new gospel of our own invention, and that it differs from the regulation diet in nothing but in being served up in plain English and without slop-sauce or sectarian skewers. If only, having, as it were, attracted the sheep to the church door, we could then hand them over, saying “Go in – you’ll find all the stuff there”. But they won’t go in, and half the time the stuff isn’t there, but something that looks quite different. So we find ourselves frantically trying to feed sheep with one hand and do our proper work with the other, to the neglect of both and the great scandal of everybody!

  Well, now, what do my sheep want? They keep on bawling for

  (a) “A book which tells me all about Christian dogma.” They want it written in reasonable English and not in technical theological jargon. They want it to be aware of the particular difficulties experienced by the adult 20th-century mind. And they don’t want it “churchy”, or polemical; and they don’t want everything in it to be contradicted by the next book they read, which happens to be written by a member of a different communion.

  The best I’ve found so far are J. S. Whale’s Christian Doctrine2 and Leslie Simmonds’ Framework of Faith.3 The former slips into anti-Roman polemic here and there, and the latter occasionally seems to leap a gap of argument without quite bridging it; but they both cover the ground and are up-to-date and reasonably aware of the common man’s habits of thought. Bede Frost’s Who?4 is good for the purely theistic argument, but goes no further; and there are some goodish books on Christology, but what’s wanted most is orderly presentation of the structure of Christianity as a whole. (N.B. Fr Simmonds’ book was burnt alive in the London blitz, which has made it rather useless to recommend it; I don’t know whether it is now available again. And Whale’s book only came out this autumn – so that hasn’t yet helped much. But these two books seem to me on the right lines.)

  (b) “A book about the New Testament.” People want to know the order in which the books of the N.T. were written, and what modern scholars think about their dates, authenticity, and so on. Most people still imagine that the “Higher Criticism” has more or less exploded half the Scriptures, and they don’t know anything about the results of recent archaeological research or textual criticism. And it’s no good giving them bibliographical treatises on the Synoptists, full of tables of comparison and hiccuping references to “Q” and “Proto-Matt” and “M” and “m” and “LM” scattered all over the shop, because they didn’t read a Language School at Oxford and don’t know what to make of all those games. The popular idea they have got of the results of biblical criticism is something like this:

  “Everything in the N.T. was written centuries after it all happened, by people who pretended to be the disciples, but weren’t really, and who misunderstood most of what they had been told and deliberately altered the rest.

  “Mark wrote a simple human story without any theology in it.

  “Criticism has proved that Matthew and Luke, where they are ‘early’, are a bad rehash of Mark, with some tendentious theology put in; and where they are ‘late’ are liars.

  “John was written at least several centuries after all the disciples were dead, by a Greek philosopher who invented a lot of things for Jesus to say, to link up with Plato, or something.

  “Paul invented the Church, contrary to Christ’s intention.

  “Any ‘early’ document is ‘purer’ than any later document; if Paul’s Epistles are really earlier than the Gospels it looks as though there was a screw loose somewhere – but there isn’t a handy book which gives us the dates; and we know Paul must be wrong because that is a well-known fact, proved by Criticism.

  “None of the historical dates and facts in the Gospels agree with contemporary history. There is some sort of muddle in Luke about the census, for instance.

  “The Protestants say that the Church depends on the Scriptures; the Catholics say that the Scriptures depend on the Church. We think that the Scriptures were selected and made into the Bible by a committee of Fathers, but we don’t know when, or why they selected those particular books. Nor do we know if there really were any other books to choose from, still less what they were like.

  “Criticism has proved that the texts of all the books differ a great deal and are very unreliable. Most of the texts people argue about and use to prove theology are interpolations. Whenever we find a text that seems to prove Christianity, our agnostic friends tell us that one can’t use it, because it is John, or Paul, or Matthew, or late, or an interpolation or only found in one manuscript; and Criticism has proved that everything that is any of these things must be wrong.”

  Going on from these two persistent bleats, I am inclined to demand further:

  (c) A book that will give some coherent and intelligible account of how doctrine came to be formulated – at what dates, under what pressure from events and popular heresies, under what other circumstances, and by whom. Also, in what way these doctrines are implicit in the Scriptures and in the teaching of Christ and the experience of the early Church. (The general impression is that everybody was getting along nicely with the Simple Gospel, consisting chiefly of the Sermon on the Mount and Suffer-little-children, ti
ll a number of professional argufiers took it into their heads to have some theology, and so gave rise to heresies.)

  (d) A Handbook to Heresies – not arranged under the names of the Heretics, but according to the subjects: Heresies about God, about Christ, about the Trinity, and so on, so that one can look them up quickly; with the dates and history of the people who started thinking that way, and why it was an unsatisfactory way to think; also, who refuted them, and what Council condemned them. And also, the names of the gentlemen who hash them up for public consumption today under the impression that they are brilliant new contributions to contemporary thought. (I am tired of being taunted with “neo-Orthodoxy”; I want, for a change, to see a few “original and revolutionary thinkers” identified as neo-Manichees, neo-Nestorians, neo-Sabellians, and so on.)

  (e) A scholarly book along the lines of Cochrane’s Christianity and Classical Culture,5 only not so bulky, difficult and expensive, showing how the happy pagan thinkers got themselves into much the same sort of intellectual and religious muddle, and the same “flight from reason” as ourselves, through too much all-round tolerance and devotion to scientific humanism; and how “Athanasian” orthodoxy didn’t produce the Dark Ages, but was the only thing stiff enough to get through them and come out the other side. Also, that the apparent alteration of the Church’s attitude to State affairs after Constantine (with the appearance of compromise, casuistry, legality, and all the rest of it) was not just naughtiness and truckling to Caesar, but a consequence of the fact that she had, for the first time to accept responsibility for what happened in the world and the State, and was thus brought up against the “problem of power” in an acute form.6

  (f) A book about the technical terms used in Theology, most of which are now meaningless to the common bloke, or else carry quite misleading meanings: e.g. person, substance, being, sacrifice, reason (ratio sapientiae, including what we know now as “imagination”, not merely ratio scientiae7 – if you talk about the “Divine Reason” or the “Logos” people think you mean inductive reasoning and logic), prophecy, sin, “begotten of the Father” (always supposed to refer exclusively to the paternity of the human Jesus), nature, worship, flesh, etc. etc. Anderson-Scott has done a little pamphlet on these lines, called Words (S.C.M. sixpence), but it is limited to New Testament words and does not, I think, deal fully with the way words change their meaning in course of time, or in passing from one technical vocabulary to the other. (For instance, the gradual deterioration of the word “reason” in passing from the Middle Ages, through the 18th century, to the 20th-century scientific use, or the similar change in the word “science” itself; or the difference in meaning between “energy” as used in physics, in theology, and in common speech. Also, the book should make it clear to people that Theology is a science, with technical terms of its own, which its exponents have as much right to use as other scientists have to use their technical terms; and that it is just as silly to argue about theology without bothering to learn its technical vocabulary as it would be to dispute physics with physicists under the impression that “force” means to them what it means to Hitler, or to try and disprove the propostion (a + b) (a – b) = a2 – b on the ground that, as a is a vowel and b is a consonant, you cannot subtract one from the other. (At least half the misunderstandings of the common man are due to the fact that he supposes theological terms to mean exactly what they mean in common speech, and that he thinks they have no right to mean anything else. And it’s not much good to say to him, “Go away and learn the vocabulary”, because he would immediately say, “All right, but where is it?”)