Lex Operandi, Lex Credendi: Dorothy L. Sayers's Theology of Work

Lex Operandi, Lex Credendi: Dorothy L. Sayers’s Theology of Work

by Christine Pennylegion

Copyright 2023 Christine Pennylegion

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Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter One: Work Isn’t Working

References

Chapter Two: Why Study Dorothy L. Sayers?

Biographical Sketch

From Novelist to Theologian

Legacy

References

Chapter Three: Towards a Theology of Work

Gaudy Night (1935): the unforgiveable... since against intellectual integrity

The Zeal of Thy House (1937): to labour is to pray

The Mind of the Maker (1941): the vocation of the creative mind in man

Essays and Addresses (1940s): a sacramental relation between man and his work

Dorothy L. Sayers’s Theology of Work, in Summation

References

Chapter Four: A Practical Theology of Work for the Church

Integrity and Excellence in All Things

Good Work for the People of God

Christian Work is Work Done by Christian People

And Being Fashioned in His Image..

References

Chapter Five: The Sweetest Things in Life

References

About Christine Pennylegion

Bibliography

Notes

Preface

Abstract: A thorough understanding of Dorothy L. Sayers’s practical and practicable theology of work and creativity can help the Church to re-evaluate what it means to be created in the image of God and correct her disordered relationship with work.

This monograph was originally submitted as the culminating effort of my master’s degree at Trinity School for Ministry (Ambridge, PA), in 2016. It has now been reformatted as an ebook in hope that it may find a wider audience. I believe that Sayers’s theology of work is of immense value to the Church, particularly in this early post-pandemic era when so many questions about the means and worth of human work are being debated across society. Although this is an academic work, it is intended not just for theologians and scholars but for pastors, lay leaders, and all interested Christians who find themselves wondering about the questions Sayers attempts to answer: What does it mean to do be made in the image of God, or to do Christian work? Is work a blessing or a curse? And how are we to do all for the glory of God in our professional lives?

A brief note on formatting: one of the challenges of converting a scholarly thesis to an ebook version is the question of what to do about references. Not all ebook readers are created equal in their ability to handle footnotes and endnotes! As this is the case, the footnoted references which previously adorned the text have been stripped out and appended, along with a brief source excerpt to orient the reader, to the end of each chapter. If you have no interest in the references, simply page through to the next section of the book. The fifteen or so notes that remain in the text provide some additional contextual comments and details. Clicking/tapping on a [NOTE] will take you to the note in question; simply click/tap [BACK] to return to your place in the text.

I do hope that you will enjoy this book and find it useful as you consider what it means to work Christianly in your own context, whatever it may be. The original preface to my thesis follows below.

Christine Pennylegion, 2023.

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Although I have known and loved Dorothy L. Sayers’s detective novels for many years, it is only relatively recently that I encountered her as a theologian. In January 2014 I took a class at Trinity School for Ministry from Dr. Janice Brown entitled Tongued with Fire: C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and T. S. Eliot. We read several of Sayers’s works, including her religious drama The Zeal of Thy House; I ended up writing my final paper for the course on how Sayers’s theology of work was manifested in this play by the protagonist, William of Sens. (That final paper ended up providing the skeletal framework for one of Chapter Three’s subsections in this thesis.) During my research I became intrigued by Sayers’s theology of work and its implications for the Church, and I quickly realised that the topic was much too large to deal with in a ten-page essay! It was a natural choice for my thesis project, and I hope that I have done Sayers’s thoughts justice.

Writing this thesis has been both pull-my-hair-out exasperating and an absolute delight. It has been a pleasure to spend the last two years with Dorothy L. Sayers, who was a remarkable woman: erudite, witty, viciously sarcastic, prolific in output, and prodigious in talent. As a writer of detective fiction, Sayers had already given me much enjoyment. As a poet, playwright, letter-writer extraordinaire, and theologian, she has given me much food for thought. I thoroughly believe that Sayers has much to offer the Church—no less in our day than in her own—and I believe that her reputation as a Christian writer and thinker will eventually rise to meet (or perhaps even surpass) her reputation as a mystery author. Sayers’s voice is begging to be rediscovered by the Church, and the field of Sayers studies is relatively young, with much work to be done—it is really quite exciting. She is especially good on those nagging questions of human existence: What does it mean to be made in God’s image? What have I (or you) been put here on earth to do? What does it mean to do one’s work for the glory of God and how are we to go about it? The goal of this thesis is to present Sayers’s answer on these questions, and, I hope, to pique the reader’s interest in her theology in general.

Several sources were particularly helpful. Above all, I owe a tremendous debt and great thanks to the late Dr. Barbara Reynolds, who not only wrote the excellent biography Dorothy L. Sayers: Her Life and Soul, but collected and edited the four volumes of The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers. Reynolds’s biography gives a thorough and enjoyable introduction to Sayers’s life and work, and the Letters are unsurpassable in value for those seeking closer contact with the mind of Sayers herself. Catherine Kenney’s The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers gives the interested reader a very good overview of Sayers’s writings, particularly her detective fiction. Laura K. Simmons’s Creed without Chaos: Exploring Theology in the Writings of Dorothy L. Sayers is a valuable entry-point to Sayers’s theological thought, arranged thematically. Finally, Christine M. Fletcher’s The Artist and the Trinity: Dorothy L. Sayers’s Theology of Work came at just the right time to refine my own thinking on the topic, and to reassure and encourage me in this endeavour.

A note about language is appropriate here. Dorothy L. Sayers declined to identify herself as a feminist, although many today would so call her based on her strong assertions of the co-humanity of men and women. She did not use inclusive language, and, in fact, advocated against it. Anglo-Saxon very sensibly used the words wer and wyf to denote the male and female of the human species, and man or mann to refer to the species as a whole; modern English changed wyf to wife, dropped wer entirely (surviving only in reference to werewolves), and retained man as—confusingly—the word for both the species entire and its male component. Sayers maintained that this was simply an awkward problem of the English language, rather than an issue of equality between the sexes, and quite deliberately used man as a stand-in for all humankind. This language may be old fashioned, but neither Sayers nor I hold it to be intrinsically chauvinistic in nature, any more than it is discriminatory to refer to the Church as she. Rather, it is simply a reflection that the English language, flexible as it may be in many regards, also has a few inherent weaknesses. When Sayers refers to man or mankind it should be taken for granted that she refers to all humanity, unless clarified otherwise. It should also be noted that while Sayers wrote in British English, certain American editions of her work have Americanized her spelling (changing labour to labor and the like). I have kept her spelling exactly as found in my source texts, whether British or American, and hope that the reader will forgive a few inconsistencies in spelling for the sake of fidelity to the source.

I owe a deep debt of gratitude to many who have laboured alongside me in this project. Dr. Phil Harrold’s encouragement, wise counsel, and general policy of benign neglect were exactly what I needed from a thesis advisor: thank you for your advice and understanding, insightful editing suggestions, and for trusting me to get on with the job. Susanah Hanson and Stacey Williard spurred me on to do a thesis in the first place, and patiently answered all my questions about policy and procedure. Jasmine Simeone of the Dorothy L. Sayers Society greatly helped me in clearing up some ambiguous publication dates of Sayers’s essays. Friends, classmates, and other unsuspecting bystanders have listened to me babble about Sayers and work and all the rest of it, often at greater length and in more detail than they ever would have anticipated; I am grateful for their patience, prayers, and intelligent questions. This thesis could not have been finished without my two children greatly helping their Mama out by napping at the same time... most of the time... well, sometimes. Finally, this project absolutely could not have succeeded without my husband David’s loving support: thank you for taking care of the children when I needed those precious hours at the library or my desk, for listening to me work out my ideas, for never letting me give up, and for never giving up on me.

Christine Pennylegion, 2016. Soli Deo Gloria.

Chapter One: Work Isn’t Working

I have been trying to drive the thing about ‘the integrity of the work’ into the heads of the multitudes – all very difficult. They always want the economic system altered before they begin to think what they want it altered to or for... – Dorothy L. Sayers

On December 21, 1940, a letter was published in The Times outlining ten peace points as guidelines for the post-war world that Britain soon hoped to enjoy, signed by leaders in the Catholic, Anglican, and Free Churches. This letter cited and supported both the pope’s peace points and the five standards of the Oxford Conference, an ecumenical meeting held in 1937 which had addressed social and political problems and was intended to provide guidance for both internal and external relations in peaceable Britain. It attracted attention chiefly because of its ecumenical nature, and was followed by two well attended public meetings in May of 1941, the first, on ‘A Christian International Order,’ chaired by Cardinal Hinsley, and the second, on ‘A Christian Order in Britain,’ chaired by Archbishop Lang. The new Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. William Temple, subsequently brought together ten thinkers to write a commentary on those ten peace points, which was published in 1942.

Number nine on the list was the call for the restoration of a sense of divine vocation in each person’s daily work, and its assigned thinker was Dorothy L. Sayers, a well-known detective novelist who had recently turned to writing and speaking as a lay Christian theologian. Her article on the subject, Vocation in Work, cogently lays out the problem that she saw with work as it then stood:

"To the assertion, ‘Man is only man when he produces (or makes),’ the Christian may readily assent: for that is the Adam made in the image of God. But when the words ‘the means of livelihood’ are added, they rivet upon the essential nature of man the judgment of man’s corruption: ‘economic man’ is Adam under the curse. The economic factor in human society is, of course, a reality, as sin and pain and sorrow and every other human evil are realities; and it is the duty of Christians to accept and redeem those real evils. But to assume, as we have increasingly allowed ourselves to assume of late years—to assume, as so many well-intentioned architects of an improved society assume today—that economics is the sole basis of man’s dealings with nature and with his fellow-men, is the very negation of all Christian