The Gospel in Dorothy Sayers - Pt 1

 Dorothy Sayers has long been one of my favorite intellectual heroes.  I have loved her mysteries (particularly the Lord Peter Wimsey series) since my youth, and upon my introduction to Dante's Divine Comedy in freshman year of college, have admired her as a brilliant translator/poet.  Further in my academic career I encountered her essays and monographs on theology and ethics (my favorites being The Mind of the Maker and The Man Born to Be King).  All told, Sayers is a tremendous wit, an acute scholar, and a sharp student of humanity and culture.

My admiration for Sayers prompted me to purchase a clever volume from Plough Publishing House: The Gospel in Dorothy L. Sayers: Selections from Her Novels, Plays, Letters, and Essays (Edited by Carole Vanderhoof. Walden, NY: Plough, 2018).  Vanderhoof collates passages (ranging from individual sentences to multiple pages in length) from diverse Sayers works under 20 editorial categories (e.g., Conscience, Belief, Despair and Hope, and Incarnation).

In this short series of blog posts, I will share excerpts from The Gospel in Dorothy L. Sayers, sometimes accompanied by my own reflections.  I hope to inspire you to purchase the book yourself - and I myself am eagerly anticipating purchasing and reading the other volumes in Plough's The Gospel in Great Writers series: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, George MacDonald, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.  Great stuff!

I. Ethical Foundations

"We have seen, too, what happens to reason divorced from theology.  Encouraged by its success in subduing the material universe, it refuses to admit the validity of anything that is not capable of scientific proof.  Its next step is to try to justify the natural virtues by their material results - whence we get the ugly and egotistical doctrine of enlightened self-interest and the hideous tyranny of economics.  The last achievement of reason is always to cast doubt on its own validity, so that the final result of rationalism is the appearance of a wholly irrational universe.

"Thus, human ethics, left to themselves, became helpless and self-contradictory - exactly as they did in pagan times.

"The men who now rule Germany [the Nazis], having thrown over the Christian theology, see clearly enough that the Christian ethic will not work without it.  Therefore, they have jettisoned the ethics as well.  We are greatly shocked by this.  But have we the right to be surprised?  If Christ is the only guarantee that reason is rational and goodness is good, then, the logical result of repudiating Christianity is the repudiation of reason and virtue." (Sayers, "The Religions Behind the Nation," March 5, 1941. Cited in The Gospel in Dorothy L. Sayers, p. 19)

In the late 1800s, Friedrich Nietzsche saw clearly that renouncing belief in God had as a logical correlative rejecting belief in an objective Judeo-Christian morality - all that could remain is a subjective will to power, or the transvaluation of values.  But Nietzsche also saw that contemporary European society was not ready to acknowledge the death of ethics that would accompany the death of God.

Sadly, we have not progressed beyond Nietzsche in this respect.  Western society continues to obliterate vestiges of Christian belief and practice, and has begun chipping away at contours of a traditional Christian ethic ... but the average contemporary Westerner remains blithely unaware that their ethical edifice is but a magisterial castle in the sky: a beautiful building with no rational foundation.

Several Christmases ago, I had a great conversation with my mom, talking about the changing ethical beliefs of the 'next generation'.  My mom was bemoaning that many of the things that she and her generation valued (ethically) seemed to be rejected by younger generations - and she asked why I thought that was the case.

I shared, in brief, that her (my mom's) generation (in Canada, in the 1960s primarily) had moved beyond the Christian beliefs and practices of their parents; and the next generation was gradually working out the implications of post-Christianity.  If Christian theology served as the rational foundation for the Judeo-Christian ethic of my mom's generation, then we should not be surprised that, having rejected the foundation, the ethical edifice would risk collapse.

Perhaps this would not be too much of a concern; but belief in human equality and universal human rights - arguably the cornerstone ethical values and virtues in contemporary society - are explicitly grounded in the Christian theology that so many are in a rush to reject.  The question is: can those same ethical values be sustained absent God?  I doubt it - and suspect that as (if?) society continues to move beyond Christendom, that widespread commitment to universal human rights will wane as well.  (Perhaps an initial evidence of this ... witness the Western world's lack of concern for the active genocide being perpetrated against the Rohingya in Myanmar or the Uyghur in China, or Russia's annexation of the Crimea from Ukraine, or China's recent de-democratization and de-liberalization of Hong Kong.)

Time will tell ... but it seems to me that Sayers was 100% correct - about the Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s, about the atheistic Communists in Russian, China, and North Korea, and about what's just around the corner for us.  Where there is no God, it will soon follow that there is no objective morality - only 'might makes right'.