C. S. Lewis, the Inklings, & Others: Dorothy Sayer's Letters to a Diminished Church

Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine
By Dorothy L Sayers
W Publishing Group, 2004
(288 pages, $14.99, paperback)

reviewed by Ed Hopkins

Dorothy L. Sayers is probably best known for her detective fiction, especially the novels and short stories featuring the gentleman amateur detective, Lord Peter Wimsey. She also was the author of several plays, including the widely acclaimed BBC radio drama “The Man Born to Be King,” a play concerning the life of Christ. For the last ten years of her life she translated Dante’s Divine Comedy. Her translation is still considered one of the best, and her prefaces and notes are very helpful, especially for the first-time reader of Dante. Sayers was also an insightful lay theologian and this book collects 16 of her essays, mostly on theological concerns.

Sayers is a bold apologist for orthodox Christian doctrine—for what Lewis called “Mere Christianity.” In the first essay, “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged,” she writes that many people claim that the churches are empty because people are bored with dogma. She counters that it is the neglect of dogma that makes for dullness. “The Christian faith is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man—and the dogma is the drama.” The drama of the Son of God who came to live among us, betrayed by enemies, crucified and risen again surely cannot be dull,” Sayers says. And again: “…we may call that doctrine exhilarating, or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation, or we may call it rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all.”

Sayers continues this theme in the third essay, “The Dogma is the Drama.” She expounds the point of the previous essay, without the dogmas of the Christian faith, we have no faith to proclaim. “It is the dogma that is the drama—not beautiful phrases, not comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something nice after death—but the terrifying assertion that the same God who made the world, lived in the world and passed through the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and they may not believe it; but at least they may realize that here is something that a man might be glad to believe.”

One of my favorites of Sayers essays is entitled “Creed or Chaos?” Writing in the tumultuous years of World War II, Sayers saw the upheaval in Western society as at base a conflict between a Christian civilization and barbarism. The only hope she sees for a preservation of Order is a return to creedal Christian orthodoxy. She quotes Lord David Cecil (a lesser-known member of the Inklings group): “Christianity has compelled the mind of man, not because it is the most cheering view of human existence, but because it is truest to the facts.” She observes: “I think this is true; and it seems to me quite disastrous that the idea should have got about that Christianity is an other-worldly, unreal, idealistic kind of religion that suggests that if we are good we shall be happy—or if not, it will all be made up to us in the next existence.”

I also have found much help in two essays concerning traditional Christian moral teaching on vice and virtue. These are “The Other Six Deadly Sins” and “Christian Morality.”

It is unfortunate that the blurb on the back cover of the book perpetuates a misunderstanding about Dorothy L. Sayers’ relationship to the Inklings. The Inklings was a group of men (only men) who were friends of C. S. Lewis and met on a fairly regular basis in Lewis’ rooms at Oxford or in a local pub for friendship and to encourage one another in their literary pursuits. There is no evidence that Sayers ever attended these meetings. She was a correspondent with members of the group, especially Lewis and Charles Williams, and they both regarded her as a friend, and her interests overlapped those of the Inklings in many ways, yet she can’t rightly be considered a member of the Inklings Group.

Ed Hopkins is the Executive Editor of The Inklings Review, proprietor of Inklings Bookshop, and rector of New Covenant Church (Reformed Episcopal), Lynchburg, VA.