I’ve known of Dorothy Sayers for a long time simply because she ran in the same circles as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and was influenced greatly by G.K. Chesterton, all of whom I adore. However, I did not know her on her own writing merits. And meritorious she is. In reading Letters to a Diminished Church I have been properly gobsmacked by Sayers’ incisive, sharp, eloquent prose and the depth and clarity of her thinking. Even when I am not sure I agree with her I am forced to reckon with the depth and thoughtfulness of her arguments (and to be clear, I largely agree with her as she is both orthodox and doxological). She communicates deep theology and a transcendent view of the church with rhetorical simplicity and power. What has stood out to me the most, of all her brilliant authorship, is the timelessness and timeliness of her words. Here are fifty of the best quotes from this wonderful collection of essays.
- 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.
- Whatever game he is playing with his creation, he has kept his own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that he has not exacted from himself. He has himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair, and death. When he was a man, he played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.
- We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him meek and mild,” and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies.
- when confronted with neat dialectical traps, he displayed a paradoxical humor that affronted serious-minded people, and he retorted by asking disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered by rule of thumb. He was. emphatically not a dull man in his human lifetime, and if he was God, there can be nothing dull about God either.
- Now, we may call that doctrine exhilarating, or we may call it devastating; we may call it revelation, or we may call it rub-bish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning at all.
- That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and find him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama indeed.
- Only when we know what we truly believe can we decide whether it is comforting. If we are comforted by something we do not really believe, then we had better think again.
- Any stigma, said a witty tongue, “will do to beat a dogma”; and the flails of ridicule have been brandished with such energy of late on the threshing floor of controversy that the true seed of the Word has become well-nigh lost amid the whirling of chaff.
- Somehow or other, and with the best intentions, we have shown the world the typical Christian in the likeness of a crashing and rather ill-natured bore—and this in the name of one who assuredly never bored a soul in those thirty-three years during which we passed through the world like a flame.
- If all men are offended because of Christ, let them be offended; but where is the sense of their being offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like him? We do him singularly little honor by watering down his personality till it could not offend a fly. Surely it is not the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to adapt men to Christ.
- The fact is that all language about everything is analogical; we think in a series of metaphors. We can explain nothing in terms of itself, but only in terms of other things.
- To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.
- That God had at some moment or other created the universe complete with all the vestiges of an imaginary past. . . It is the way every novel in the world is written. . . That is to say, that past, existing only in the mind of the maker, produces a true and measurable effect upon the written part of the book, precisely as though it had, in fact, “taken place” within the work of art itself.
- The error of the Middle Ages, on the whole, was to use analogical, metaphorical, poetical techniques for the investigation of scientific questions. But increasingly, since the seventeenth century, we have tended to the opposite error-that of using the quantitative methods of science for the investigation of poetic truth.
- We have a population that is literate, in the sense that everybody is able to read and write; but, owing to the emphasis placed on scientific and technical training at the expense of the humanities, very few of our people have been taught to understand and handle language as an instrument of power.
- It is worse than useless for Christians to talk about the importance of Christian morality unless they are prepared to take their stand upon the fundamentals of Christian theology.
- the reason why the churches are discredited today is not that they are too bigoted about theology, but that they have run away from theology. . . if we really want a Christian society, we must teach Christianity, and that it is absolutely impossible to teach Christianity without teaching Christian dogma.
- If Christian ministers really believe it is only an intellectual game for theologians and has no bearing upon human life, it is no wonder that their congregations are ignorant, bored, and bewildered.
- The central dogma of the Incarnation is that by which relevance stands or falls. If Christ were only man, then he is entirely irrelevant to any thought about God; if he is only God, then he is entirely irrelevant to any experience of human life. It is, in the strictest sense, necessary to the salvation of relevance that a man should believe rightly the Incarnation of Our Lord, Jesus Christ. Unless he believes rightly, there is not the faintest reason why he should believe at all. And in that case, it is wholly irrelevant to chatter about Christian principles.
- I believe it to be a grave mistake to present Christianity as something charming and popular with no offense in it. Seeing that Christ went about the world giving the most violent offense to all kinds of people, it would seem absurd to expect that the doctrine of his person can be so presented as to offend nobody.
- At the risk of appearing quite insolently obvious, I shall say that if the Church is to make any impression on the modern mind she will have to preach Christ and the cross.
- The people who are most discouraged and made despondent by the barbarity and stupidity of human behavior at this time are those who think highly of homo sapiens as a product of evolution, and who still cling to an optimistic belief in the civilizing influence of progress and enlightenment.
- The final tendency of the modern philosophies-hailed in their day as a release from the burden of sinfulness— has been to bind man hard and fast in the chains of an iron determinism.
- But so long as the Church continues to teach the manhood of God and to celebrate the sacraments of the Eucharist and of marriage, no living man should dare to say that matter and body are not sacred to her.
- Nothing has so deeply discredited the Christian Church as her squalid submission to the economic theory of society.
- There is a Christian doctrine of work, very closely related to the doctrines of the creative energy of God and the divine image in man. . .The fallacy is that work is not the expression of man’s creative energy in the service of society, but only something he does in order to obtain money and leisure.
- Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is to look backward; to look forward, we must believe in age.
- “Except ye become as little children,” except you can wake on your fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five, “ye cannot see the Kingdom of God.” One must not only die daily, but every day one must be born again.
- In contending with the problem of evil, it is useless to try to escape either from the bad past or into the good past. The only way to deal with the past is to accept the whole past, and by accepting it, to change its meaning.
- It is difficult to blame the common man very much for this natural reaction against the insistent identification of Christian morality with everything that Christ most fervently abhorred.
- For it is the great curse of gluttony that it ends by destroying all sense of the precious, the unique, the irreplaceable.
- Envy is the great leveler. If it cannot level things up, it will level them down; and the words constantly in its mouth are “my rights” and “my wrongs.” At its best, envy is a climber and a snob; at its worst, it is a destroyer; rather than have anybody happier than itself, it will see us all miserable together.
- The sixth deadly sin is named by the Church acedia or sloth. In the world it calls itself tolerance; but in hell it is called despair. It is the accomplice of the other sins and their worst punishment. It is the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in noth-ing, lives for nothing, and remains alive only because there is nothing it would die for.
- [Pride] is the sin of trying to be as God. It is the sin that proclaims that man can produce out of his own wits, and his own impulses, and his own imagination the standards by which he lives: that man is fitted to be his own judge. It is pride that turns man’s virtues into deadly sins by causing each self-sufficient virtue to issue in its own opposite, and as a grotesque and horrible travesty of itself.
- For the devilish strategy of pride is that it attacks us, not on our weak points, but on our strong.
- There is a proverb that says that the way to hell is paved with good intentions. We usually take it as referring to intentions that have been weakly abandoned, but it has a deeper and much subtler meaning. That road is paved with good intentions strongly and obstinately pursued until they have become self-sufficing ends in themselves and deified.
- The Church asserts that there is a Mind which made the universe, that He made it because He is the sort of Mind that takes pleasure in creation, and that if we want to know what the Mind of the Creator is, we must look at Christ. In Him, we shall discover a Mind that loved His own creation so completely that He became part of it, suffered with and for it, and made it a sharer in His own glory and a fellow worker with Himself in the working out of His own design for it.
- But He takes our sins and errors and turns them into victories, as He made the crime of the Crucifixion to be the salvation of the world.
- When Judas sinned, Jesus paid; He brought good out of evil, He led out triumph from the gates of Hell and brought all mankind out with Him; but the suffering of Jesus and the sin of Judas remain a reality. God did not abolish the fact of evil: He transformed it. He did not stop the Crucifixion: He rose from the dead.
- Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker’s faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.
- We should look on our leisure as the period of changed rhythm that refreshed us for the delightful purpose of getting on with our work.
- Christian people, and particularly perhaps the Christian clergy, must get it firmly into their heads that when a man or woman is called to a particular job of secular work, that is as true vocation as though he or she were called to specifically religious work.
- In nothing has the Church so lost Her hold on reality as in Her failure to understand and respect the secular vocation. She has allowed work and religion to become separate departments, and is astonished to find that, as a result, the secular work of the world is turned to purely selfish and destructive ends, and that the greater part of the world’s intelligent workers have become irreligious, or at least, uninterested in religion.But is it astonishing? How can anyone remain interested in a religion which seems to have no concern with nine-tenths of his life?
- The only Christian work is good work well done. Let the Church see to it that the workers are Christian people and do their work well, as to God: then all the work will be Christian work, whether it is church embroidery, or sewage farming.
- How do we say that God creates, and how does this compare with the act of creation by an artist? To begin with, of course, we say that God created the universe “out of nothing” – he was bound by no conditions of any kind. Here there can be no comparison; the human artist is in the universe and bound by its conditions. He can create only within that framework and out of that material that the universe supplies.
- Evil and darkness and chaos are pure negation, and there is no such state as “before the light” because it is the primary light that creates the whole time process. It is an illusion; and that is the primary illusion inside which the devil lives and in which he deceives himself and others.
- It is scarcely the business of Christian writers to introduce novelties into the fundamental Christian doctrines. But profundity is another matter; Christian theology is profound, and since I did not invent it, I may have the right to say so.
- Christ, even for Christians, is not quite really real—not altogether human—and the taint of unreality has spread to his disciples and friends and to his biographers; they are not “real” writers, but just “Bible” writers. John and Matthew and Luke and Mark, some or all of them, disagree about the occasion on which a parable was told or an epigram uttered. One or all must be a liar or untrustworthy because Christ (not being quite real must have made every remark once and once only. He could not, of course, like a real teacher, have used the same illustration twice, or found it necessary to hammer the same point home twenty times over, as one does when addressing audiences of real people and not of Bible characters.
- The only two things we can do with death are, first, to postpone it, which is only a partial solution, and, secondly, to transfer the whole set of values connected with death to another sphere of action-that is, from time to eternity.
- Individual liberty is compatible with social order only if the individual freely consents to restrictions on his personal liberty; and that if every man is free to develop all his powers equally to the utmost, there can be no sort of equality between the weak and the strong.
