Everyday Dogma

Pert, pince-nezed Dorothy Leigh Sayers, 56, is best known to readers in the U.S. and Britain as a crack writer of whodunits (Busman's Honeymoon, Murder Must Advertise, etc.). But what really interests Anglican Sayers is religion. Two years ago she announced: "I have given up writing crime stories. Instead, I have engaged in a four-year task of translating Dante's Divine Comedy."

Published this week is a new Sayers book that lies somewhere between the two. Creed or Chaos (Harcourt, Brace; $2.25) is a collection of seven essays on contemporary Christianity, turned out with all the phrasemaking flair of a veteran bestseller writer. "The Christian faith," she writes, "is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man--and the dogma is the drama."

Honest God. Like Anglican C. S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters'), Dorothy Sayers specializes in reducing orthodox theology to everyday terms with what is sometimes considerable shock effect. The dogma that the son of Mary was nothing less than God himself, she writes, demonstrates that God "had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair . . . He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience . . . He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worth while."

The dogma of the Incarnation may be hailed as revelation or dismissed as rubbish, but, says Dorothy Sayers, it cannot be called dull. "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 . . . is an astonishing drama indeed. Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time, would recognize it as News . . ."

The Christian Bore. Yet, complains Author Sayers, dullness is just the epithet people most often apply to dogma, simply because the churches have lately tended to subordinate dogma to a vague, generalized effulgence of sweetness and light. To demonstrate, she concocts a short examination paper with answers that might be expected from the ordinary layman:

"Q.: What does the Church think of God the Father?

"A.: He is omnipotent and holy. He created the world and imposed on man conditions impossible of fulfillment . . . He likes to be truckled to and is always ready to pounce on anybody who trips up over a difficulty in the Law, or is having a bit of fun . . .

"Q.: What does the Church think of God the Son?

"A.: . . . Unlike God the Father, He is friendly to man and did His best to reconcile man to God ... He has a good deal of influence with God . . .

"Q.: What does the Church think of God the Holy Ghost?

"A.: I don't know exactly . . .

"Q.: What does the Church think of sex?

"A.: God made it necessary to the machinery of the world, and tolerates it, provided the parties a) are married, and b) get no pleasure out of it ...

"Q.: What is faith?

"A.: Resolutely shutting your eyes to scientific fact . . .

"Q.: What are the seven Christian virtues?

"A.: Respectability, childishness, mental timidity, dullness, sentimentality, censoriousness, and depression of spirits."

With the best of intentions, according to Miss Sayers, the churches have managed to portray "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 33 years during which He passed through the world like a flame."

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