Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957) was
the daughter of an Anglican cleric. Her father was the director of the
Christchurch Cathedral Choir School. She mastered Latin and French at
a young age and later decided to pursue her first degree at Somerville
College, Oxford in modern languages. Later, she became one of the first
women to receive a degree from Oxford University, this degree in the area
of medieval studies. With her knowledge of the medieval period and of
languages, Sayers produced a popular translation of Dante's Divine
Comedy in English. As a writer, Sayers had many interests. This Anglo-Catholic
writer was an accomplished poet, playwright, detective novelist, theologian,
and apologist. She enjoyed the friendship of T. S. Eliot, Charles Williams
and C. S. Lewis. Like these men, Sayers was a voice of reason in the face
of modern skepticism and cynicism. She was a defender of the Christian
faith against the modern claim that people need to be liberated from the
restrictions dogma and doctrine were thought to place on freedom. Sayers
stressed the necessity of reason and adherence to doctrine and dogma --
rather than the her age's emphasis on sentimentality -- as the key to
finding meaning in life -- the key to obtaining the freedom human beings
desire. She attributed modern claims that doctrine and dogma are "dull" to poor teaching and poor learning. In contrast to the modern claim of dullness, Sayers described Christ's life and the Christian life
as full of great drama .
"Christ, in His Divine innocence, said to the Woman of Samaria, 'Ye worship
ye know not what' - being apparently under the impression that it might
be desirable, on the whole, to know what one was worshipping. He thus
showed Himself sadly out of touch with the twentieth-century mind, for
the cry today is: 'Away with the tendentious complexities of dogma - let
us have the simple spirit of worship; just worship, no matter of what!'
The only drawback to this demand for a generalized and undirected worship
is the practical difficulty of arousing any sort of enthusiasm for the
worship of nothing in particular."
-- Creed or Chaos?: Why Christians Must Choose Either Dogma or Disaster
"Theology itself will furnish material for argument about conduct and
morals; and should have its scope extended by a simplified course of dogmatic
theology (i.e., the rational structure of Christian thought), clarifying
the relations between the dogma and the ethics, and lending itself to
that application of ethical principles in particular instances."
-- The
Lost Tools of Learning
"I am not here to consider the feelings of academic bodies: I am concerned
only with the proper training of the mind to encounter and deal with the
formidable mass of undigested problems presented to it by the modern world.
For the tools of learning are the same, in any and every subject; and
the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the mastery
of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effort expended
by the person who has not the tools at his command. To learn six subjects
without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach
to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes
the approach to every subject an open door."
-- The
Lost Tools of Learning
"For the sole true end of education is simply this: to teach men how
to learn for themselves; and whatever instruction fails to do this is
effort spent in vain."
-- The
Lost Tools of Learning
Web Resources:
The Lost
Tools of Learning by Dorothy Sayers
The Greatest Drama Ever Told by Dorothy Sayers
OP. I. by Dorothy Sayers
The Great Apologists, Pt. 6: Dorothy Sayers by Carl Olson
