Dorothy L. Sayers’s Christology in The Man Born to be King

Abstract

Dorothy L. Sayers’s Christology in The Man Born to be King Kathryn Wehr (bio) The writings of Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) span a breathtaking range of genres and topics: from early poetry and detective fiction, to translations of medieval French poetry, to plays for the stage and radio, to nonfiction books, articles, and speeches on religious and societal subjects, to her last great passion of Dante— including a new translation from medieval Italian. Her friend C. S. Lewis predicted that she might even, in the end, be known as one of the great English letter writers for her meaty and entertaining correspondence. 1 Sayers is an author who reminds us that it is never too late to learn a new subject or language, to take an interest in a new cause, and to engage the world through a new format. Many readers enter her work by one door and are delighted to find all the other rooms to explore. For theologians, Sayers’s work of the late 1930s and early 1940s is of particular interest. Although Sayers’s fiction written throughout the 1920s and 30s is sprinkled with occasional religious comments and characters, she expresses a new kind of theological voice beginning with her 1937 Canterbury Cathedral Festival play, The Zeal of Thy House. From this point on we see an almost continuous [End Page 110] working out of creedal theology, an emphasis characteristic of her Anglo-Catholic tradition, a stream within Anglicanism.2 “To check one’s theology by the Creeds,” Sayers writes, “is the best plan I know for being sure that what one is thinking, saying, or writing, is actually Christianity.”3 She became very interested in what she called “the combined Catholic front” of Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, and Eastern Orthodoxy.4 When she uses the word Church, it is the shared historic tradition of this group she usually has in mind, and she hoped that their public cooperation could speak to the wartime needs of culture with a common platform and clear message. This was a period of intense and varied work for Sayers as she wrote for the stage, radio, and print. Her themes overlap and build upon each other, laying a solid foundation in form and content for her largest project of this period: The Man Born to be King, a cycle of twelve life-of-Christ radio plays produced on the BBC from 1941 to 1942 and published in book form in 1943. Sayers’s varied works between 1937 and 1943 all shed light on her Christology. Readers should not expect to find a systematic theology; Sayers protested that she was not a theologian and she neither was trained in nor wrote academic theology.5 Nevertheless, she wrote and spoke confidently when she believed herself to be finding fresh words for creedal theology—giving flesh to “the strong, bony structure of ‘dry’ official theology.”6 We will consider which parts of this creedal Christology caught her attention and imagination, and particularly how this takes flesh in the project that consumed much of her time from 1940– 1943: The Man Born to be King. The Zeal of Thy House includes a discussion in scene 4 between William of Sens and Michael the Archangel about the meaning of work, suffering, and the Incarnation. Sayers summarizes its message in an interview this way: “It is the work, not the workman, that matters, and . . . it is possible for men to endure great suffering because God Himself took human flesh and plumbed the depths of suffering.”7 The reaction from audiences, according to Sayers, was “not so much ‘this is too good to be true’ as ‘this is too exciting to [End Page 111] be orthodox.’”8 In response to this reaction to her play, Sayers wrote an article entitled “The Greatest Drama Ever Staged Is the Official Creed of Christendom” for the Sunday Times. 9 Before people dismiss Christ, they should at least know what the Church actually teaches about him, which is, she writes: That Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter of Nazareth, was in fact and in truth, and in the most exact and literal sense of the words, the God...