Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine

by Dorothy L. Sayers

we think in a series of metaphors. We can explain nothing in terms of itself, but only in terms of other things.

Humanism is self-contained—it provides for man no resources outside himself.

financier. Nothing has so deeply discredited the Christian Church as her squalid submission to the economic theory of society.

It is very well known to the more unscrupulous part of the press that nothing pays so well in the newspaper world as the manufacture of schisms and the exploitation of wrath. Turn over the pages of the more popular papers if you want to see how avarice thrives on hatred and the passion of violence. To foment grievance and to set men at variance is the trade by which agitators thrive and journalists make money.

The years between the wars saw the most ruthless campaign of debunking ever undertaken by nominally civilized nations. Great artists were debunked by disclosures of their private weaknesses; great statesmen, by attributing to them mercenary and petty motives, or by alleging that all their work was meaningless, or done for them by other people. Religion was debunked and shown to consist of a mixture of craven superstition and greed. Courage was debunked, patriotism was debunked, learning and art were debunked, love was debunked, and with it family affection and the virtues of obedience, veneration, and solidarity. Age was debunked by youth, and youth by age. Psychologists stripped bare the pretensions of reason and conscience and self-control, saying that these were only the respectable disguises of unmentionable unconscious impulses. Honor was debunked with peculiar virulence, and good faith, and unselfishness. Everything that could possibly be held to constitute an essential superiority had the garments of honor torn from its back and was cast out into the darkness of derision. Civilization was finally debunked till it had not a rag left to cover its nakedness.

There is, in fact, a paradox about working to serve the community, and it is this: that to aim directly at serving the community is to falsify the work; the only way to serve the community is to forget the community and serve the work.

I believe, the one important contribution that Christianity has made to esthetics. Unfortunately, we are likely to use the words creation and creativeness very vaguely and loosely because we do not relate them properly to our theology. But it is significant that the Greeks did not have this word in their esthetic at all. They looked on a work of art as a kind of techne, a manufacture. Neither, for that matter, was the word in their theology—they did not look on history as the continual act of God fulfilling itself in creation.

There is a school of criticism that is always trying to explain, or explain away, a man’s works of art by trying to dig out the events of his life and his emotions outside the works themselves, and saying, “These are the real Aeschylus, the real Shakespeare, of which the poems are only faint imitations.”

Now, entertainment and moral spellbinding have their uses, but they are not art in the proper sense. They may be the incidental effects of good art, but they may also be the very aim and essence of false art. And if we continue to demand of the arts only these two things, we shall starve and silence the true artist and encourage instead the false artist, who may become a very sinister force indeed.

As the amusement art seeks to produce the emotions without the experience, so this pseudoart seeks to produce the behavior without the experience.

We see the arts degenerating into mere entertainment that corrupts and relaxes our civilization, and we try in alarm to correct this by demanding a more moralizing and bracing kind of art. But this is only setting up one idol in place of the other. Or

It is precisely the Devil’s business to appear attractive;

The Devil is a spiritual lunatic, but, like many lunatics, he is extremely plausible and cunning.

The second thing is, that the words problem and solution, as commonly used, belong to the analytic approach to phenomena and not to the creative. Though it has become a commonplace of platform rhetoric that we can “solve our problems” only by dealing with them “in a creative way,” those phrases betray either that the speaker has repeated a popular cliché without bothering to think what it means, or that he is quite ignorant of the nature of creativeness.

The concept of problem and solution is as meaningless, applied to the act of creation, as it is when applied to the act of procreation.