Whimsical Christian: A Book Reflection

Intro: When I was a child, I remember enjoying some of the Lord Peter Wimsey detective stories written by Dorothy Sayers. Years later, based on a recommendation I don't recall, I requested The Whimsical Christian for a Christmas or birthday present, which Husband was obliging enough to get. Notwithstanding a humbly designed cover and text layout, this book became one of my favorites from 2023, so I wanted to do a reflection on it this week. As a reminder, here's the general outline of this post: I will . . .

1. Contextualize the author's writings as a whole (bibliography)
2. Bring the author's major ideas to the present day
3. Comment on major sections of the book, or important chapters, depending on organization

What Else did Dorothy Write?

Being a somewhat compulsive writer, Dorothy had an impressive literary output. Publishing from 1923 until her death (1957), she started with the Lord Peter Wimsey series, including 11 novels and additional short stories. Before Jill Paton Walsh (1937-2020) continueed the Wimsey series, its contents included:

• Whose Body?
• Clouds of Witnesses
• Unnatural Death
• The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club
• Lord Peter Views the Body
• The Documents in the Case
• Strong Poison
• Five Red Herrings
• Have His Carcase
• Hangman's Holiday
• Murder Must Advertise
• The Nine Tailors
• Gaudy Night
• Busman's Honeymoon
• In the Teeth of the Evidence
• Striding Folly

Following and partially overlapping that, she wrote Christianity-focused poems, translated Tristan (Thomas of Britain) and Dante's works including Divine Comedy, and--once she didn't need to make additional income--scripts for successful and provocative plays

The Whimsical Christian is a re-titled collection of her abundant theological essays, written around the 1930s. Its wide-ranging topics include morality, the arts, biblical narratives, and a post-Christian world. Her letters were posthumously published in several volumes.

Contextualizing Sayers' Major Ideas

To introduce Dorothy's major ideas, it's important to summarize her biography (link from the Sayers Society):

• Only child of a headmaster-priest, b. 1893-d.1957.
• Studied at Oxford (modern languages), then went into copyrighting because she didn't want to be a secluded academic
• While writing full-time, she published 14 Lord Peter Wimsey novels along with poetry, essays, and translations of older works
• Married at 33, father died when she was 35, cared for her mother until she died a year later. Then she was persuaded to write a Wimsey play.
• That play was successful enough for her to stop writing full-time and compose more plays instead.
• Anglican (Church of  England).
• Compulsively and constantly wrote. Friendly and pugnacious, invited to give lectures

What can we glean about the key ideas driving her thought? Based on her conservative Anglican faith and the fact that many of her writings dealt metaphorically or more directly with theology as articulated in the three ecumenical Creeds and the Thirty-Nine Articles, her central idea was likely that core Christian doctrines are important enough to permeate all areas of daily life, thought, and expression.

Christian contemporaries agreed, including George MacDonald, C. S. Lewis, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. To sum up this line of thought, as she did, I quote: "The only Christian work is good work, well done."

Book Walk-Through

The book I am reflecting on this week is not a chapter book per se, but an essay collection originally published in 1969; the copyright was renewed and transferred in 1987. While this style of book isn't something I normally read, several sections had particular ways of stating supporting ideas that appealed to me. In general, the sequence of the essays flows from a dramatic framing of the Christian faith, to explorations of specific doctrines as described in the Creeds, to the arts and interpretation.

In no particular order, here are my rephrasings of important ideas:

• The spirit of the times sees man as all-sufficient, favored by inevitable progress, and working toward perpetual ease.
• Christianity, fully lived, is for those whose minds are set to grow/develop (discerning), yet who must be reborn/regenerated in Baptism.
• Worship without "dogma" is object-less/godless.
• People who are anti-Christian tend to be against a caricature they haven't verified.
• God's creativity is reflected in His image-bearers who caretake and improve the creation.
• Christian morality needs Christian theology as its basis.
• The Church as a whole needs to better preach the two natures in the person of Christ.
• Jesus is documented as having gone against some Jewish moral principles of His day (breaking Sabbath, eating with sinners (Judaism is one example of a shame culture, whereas the US's dominant culture is guilt-based which should inform biblical interpretation much more than it does) . . . how does this inform how the Christian is to act morally?
• The story of Oedipus is not most accurately interpreted in the Freudian tradition, but rather in the large context of "man's vain attempt to cheat the oracle" (p. 237) with incest absent.

Additional quotes from Dorothy herself are pointed:

• p. 37 "But if Christian dogma is irrelevant to life, to what, in Heaven's name, is it relevant?--since religious dogma is in fact nothing but a statement of doctrines concerning the nature of life and the universe."
• p. 86 "A poet is a man who not only suffers the impact of external events but also experiences them."
• p. 92: "The quarrel between the sciences and the humanities is chiefly a quarrel of words. And when I say that, I do not mean to suggest that it is a quarrel about nothing."
• pp. 233-4 "There are, I think, three chief errors to avoid when reading allegory. The first is a finicky insistence on finding a significance for every word in the text, even in passages that are obviously only put in to give vividness and versimiltude to the literal story. . . . The second error is that of confusing the allegorical with the literal meaning. . . . The third error is much more fundamental and is an infallible recipe for weariness of the flesh and vexation of spirit. I mean the very widespread notion that the best way to enjoy allegory is to read for the sake of the poetry, or the literal story, and not bother about what it signifies. That is the direct opposite of truth."
• p. 275 In Faust, "his hell is the picture of an eternal possibility within the heart of man; and he adds that the gate to that hell always stands wide open."

Have you read anything by Dorothy? What do you think of her? What do you think of her thoughts about Jesus Christ and the arts?