Thursday in the Week of the Third Sunday of Advent
Dorothy Leigh Sayers, Apologist and Spiritual Writer
1957
Today the Church commemorates Dorothy Leigh Sayers, who gave her learning, wit, and imagination to the proclamation of Jesus Christ, true God and true man.
Dorothy was born in Oxford in 1893, the daughter of an Anglican priest. She grew up in a rectory. At Somerville College, Oxford, she studied modern languages and completed her examinations with first-class honors in 1915. The university did not yet award degrees to women. She received hers in 1920.
She taught, worked in publishing, and then became an advertising copywriter in London. In 1923 she published Whose Body?, introducing the detective Lord Peter Wimsey. More novels followed.
Her own life contained a secret. In 1924 she gave birth to a son, John Anthony, after a relationship with Bill White, who was married. Her cousin Ivy Shrimpton brought up the child. Dorothy concealed the fact that she was his mother. Two years later she married the journalist Atherton Fleming, who had been divorced. Her public life and the private circumstances of her family did not fit easily together.
As her writing brought financial security, Dorothy turned more fully toward drama and theology. For the Canterbury Festival of 1937, she wrote The Zeal of Thy House. Its central figure was William of Sens, the architect charged with rebuilding the cathedral choir after a fire.
In the play, William’s love of his work became entangled with pride. He treated the beauty he made as his own possession. After a terrible fall, he had to surrender the completion of the building to others. Dorothy brought the craftsman’s vocation before God: the gift was real, the work mattered, and the maker still needed humility and grace.
During the Second World War, the BBC asked her to write a cycle of plays about the life of Jesus. The Man Born to Be King brought the Gospel into people’s homes through the radio.
Some listeners protested because an actor would speak the words of Christ in contemporary English. Dorothy held to the work. Jesus had lived among human beings who spoke to one another in the language of their day. To present his humanity truthfully belonged to confessing who he was.
The plays followed him through his ministry, Passion, and Resurrection. The people around him had recognizable voices, loyalties, fears, and misunderstandings. Listeners heard the Gospel unfold among people who did not yet know how the story would end.
Dorothy brought the same conviction into her essays. Christian doctrine named what God had done. If Jesus were only a man, his story could not reveal God’s own life. If his humanity were merely an appearance, he could not truly share ours. The Church confessed the one Lord who was fully divine and fully human. That confession governed how Christians understood creation, suffering, work, and salvation.
In The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy explored the Christian belief that human beings were made in God’s image through the work she knew best: writing a book. She considered the idea for a book, the work of giving it words, and its power to move a reader. These belonged together in one act of creation. She used their unity as an analogy to help readers approach the mystery of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
When Archbishop William Temple offered Dorothy a doctorate in divinity, she declined it. In her reply, she explained that an official church title could hinder her work. Some readers would discount her defense of Christianity as the speech of a church representative. She also feared that concern about giving offense would constrain her writing on other subjects.
In her later years, she devoted herself to translating Dante’s Divine Comedy. She wanted readers without Italian to enter its journey through sin and purification toward the vision of God. She also served as a churchwarden, a lay officer helping to care for the parish, at Saint Anne’s in Soho, London.
Dorothy died suddenly on December 17, 1957, before she had finished the final part of Dante’s poem. Her friend Barbara Reynolds completed the translation.
The faith Dorothy defended asks us to give our minds as well as our affections to Christ. The Lord who took our human nature receives the work of our thought and imagination. May he teach us to speak truthfully of him and to offer our gifts in his service.
Let us pray
Almighty God, who strengthened your servant Dorothy Sayers with eloquence to defend Christian teaching: Keep us, we pray, steadfast in your true religion, that in constancy and peace we may always teach right doctrine, and teach doctrine rightly; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.