The Whimsical Christian
Harrison, Barbara Grizzuti
In addition to other well-argued positions, Janie Gustafson makes an articulate case for mixed (male and female) communities of religious. Having worked in both convents and mixed situations,...
...Sayers's detective fiction is generally held to be of the first rank, and, indeed, one of her novels, Nine Tailors, is thought by many to be the finest mystery novel of the century...
...For anyone who recites the Creed or makes the Profession of Faith jadedly, Sayers' elegant and powerful prose is revivifying...
...It is not too wild on a conjecture to say that she created Lord Peter in His image...
...And it seems a shame that we are left to guess exactly when she wrote each of her essays: no dates are given...
...In the eighteen essays here collected, Sayers keeps circling back to the idea that the creative mind is an image of God the Creator...
...For those readers who know only her detective fiction, her'transcendental concerns should come as no great surprise...
...Having worked in both convents and mixed situations, and aware of the problems in each, she nevertheless has found the personal trust and 10ve engendered when men and women work together, extremely valuable in the work of Christ...
...Malcolm Cowley's columns in The New Republic hospitable to young writers...
...the repeated dark notes struck early on in this memoir of his first thirty-five years ( 1909-45...
...and there are times when her lucid compassion for human needs, and for human rights, inclines one to place her in the ranks of radicals...
...Her theology is tough, vital, and principled...
...Sayers is--if this is not a contradiction in terms--an ecstatic pessimist: "If the Church is to make any impression on the modern mind she will have to preach Christ and the cross . . . . The people who are most discouraged and made despondent by the barbarity and the stupidity of human behavior.., are those who.., still cling to an optimistic belief in the civilizing influence of progres s and enlightenment . . . . The Christian . : . . has never thought very highly of humarl nature left to itself...
...What is less well known about her is that she was a: medievalist who translated Dante, and a lay theologian...
...Commonweal: 699 There are times one wants almost to take a stick to her for being elitist or insisting upon established law and order...
...or relating Trinitarian doctrine to Christian aesthetics...
...It should be clear that Sayers does not shy away from the word, or the concept, of sin...
...Snow's quarrel between science and the humanities...
...It is recommended to readers at all levels and without reservation...
...Doomed to lead a double life," at first speaking only the Sicilian dialect and forbidden to associate with heathen riffraff of Polish, German and East-European Jewish extraction in Rochester's terra maladitta (all America in small), the imaginative boy wondered whether he could ever"be an American without feeling like an impostor" in a world where all Sicilians, when they weren't Seen as anarchist Cutthroats, were "known" to be mafiosi, and where, as if being Sicilian weren't enoug h trouble...
...he was sometimes mistaken for a Jew...
...But above all she scorns mushy-headed piety...
...Being ethnic was AN ETHNIC AT LARGE Jerry Mangione Putnam's, $12.50 [378 pp.] Saul Maloff T IHE ONCE-TRENDY, useful, mischievous, slippery, badly-abused key word of the title...
...Never mind...
...cending to a black beetle...
...Kenneth L. Woodward, Newsweek...
...She is exhilarating and subtle...
...Mangione needn't have worded excessively...
...This is an interesting book...
...and it is in this essay that she makes a frontal attack on the excesses of cold-hearted capitalism, which parades its sins as virtues...
...Here we see in a mirror darkly--we behold only the images...
...Sayers has what amounts to an affection for what she calls the "warm.hearted or disreputable sins," and no use at all for "cold-hearted and respectable sins," which" Caesar and the Pharisees...
...Her attempts to synthesize the vision and the language of the artist, the theologian, and the scientist--and to submit all of her massive intelligence to the will of the Maker--are superb...
...the circumstances of Jerry Mangione~s childhood as the first-born American son of A Com...
...one thing led to another...
...She loved Christ not least because he "took women seriously, rebuked without querulousness:, never patronized, condescended, nagged, flattered, coaxed, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female...
...If we could really be persuaded that we are miserable sinners--that the trouble is not outside us but inside us, and that therefore, by the grace of.God, we can do something to put it right--we should receive that message as the most hopeful and heartening thing that can be imagined...
...That being the Village's great historic function, he found his' kind-writers, painters, talkers...
...all this promises a view from outside, a "minority?' report on the invisible wounds, the thousand indignities, incurred for being regarded as different, foreign, inferior in nativist America...
...and, for a young man wild about writing, the Village in its Silver or Brass Age beckoned...
...For her, finally, the most profoundly thrilling and terrifying mystery drama of all was God-madehuman: ,The Christian faith," she writes, "is the most exciting drama that ever staggered the imagination of man--and the dogma is the'drama '. Her work is of a piece: The impeccable logic and the reasoned feminism that informed her mysteries also inform her 9 ogy...
...Austerely intelI I ligent, witty, and erudite, her detective fiction not only satisfies our hunger to return to the sanguine naivet~ of happy-ending nursery fables, but serves the requirements of morality as well: Sayers's mysteries reveal a passion for balance and order, a determination to right th e wrong, and a Severely logical mind...
...George MacRae, America...
...whether she is discussing the Idea of the Devil ("One of the great difficulties about writing a book or play about the Devil is to prevent that character from stealing the show...
...Her reputation as a mystery writer is secure...
...Sayers died in 1957...
...Some of us may perhaps think it a rather unimaginative and confined theology, but that is not the point...
...I Lord Peter Wimsey as Lord I THE WHIMSICAL CHRISTIAN: 18 ESSAYS Dorothy L. Sayers Macmillan, $8.95 [275 pp.] Barbara Grizzuti Harrison D OROTHY SAYERS is famous--and justly so--for her ingeniously plotted, meticulously crafted mystery novels, delicious comedies of manners which vex earnest people (among her detractors are Auden and Edmund Wilson and James Sandoe...
...For sentimental, pastel Christianity-for those who desire only comfort and uplift from religion, and for those who choose to believe in "gentle Jesus meek and mild" and not the "inflammatory" Christ of the Gospels--she has aristocratic disdain: "The reason why the churches are discredited today is not that they are too bigoted about theology, but that they have run away from theology...
...Her hound,of-God sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Wimsey's recalcitrant beloved, the prickly, independent-minded Harriet Vane, 27 October 1978:698 are forever: quoting divine-and-human-love John Donne at each.other...
...girls were in plentiful supply (and not one of them was destined to be excluded from the memoir--the principle of selection throughout is to omit nothing...
...He has been accustomed to the idea that there is a deep interior dislocation in the very center of human personality, and that you can never, as they say, 'make people good by an Act of Parliament.' " Whether her analyses of social reform are retrograde or reactionary--and what implications they have for a theology of liberation--it is for the individual reader to decide...
...The point is that the Church of Rome is a theological society, in a sense in which the Cl'turch of England . . . is not, and that because of this insistence of theology, she is a body disciplined, honored, and sociologically important...
...More than one critic has acidly remarked on Lord Peter's resemblance to an Anglican version of God: Sayers herself said of the imperturbably urbane Wimsey that his exquisite courtesy sometimes suggested "God Almight condes...
...or discussing language, allegory, and myth, image and reality...
...She reminds us that "for whatever reasonGod chose to make man as he is--limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death--he [GOd] had the honesty and courage to take his own medicine...
...No book notice can begin to reflect the exegetical nuances or the theological depth of a work such as this...
...She rejoices in the "thundering assertion 'I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of all things;, ',.'~ and from it draws the notunwarranted conclusion that "man is most godlike and most himself when he is occupied in creation:", She insists upon the sacramental nature of work., It is about theIncarnation that Sayers is most eloquent .(and most adamant: she will not countenanceany vitiating of Trinitarian or Incarnational dogma...
...She is at her most whimsical in this essay...
...or anticipating C.P...
...Fresh from college, he headed for New York, and got there at the very bottom of the Depression, but with the difference that he had a job at Time Inc., writing" Milestones," if that can be called a job...
...she is also most convincing...
...I must admit, however, that I find her satirical essays--in which she attacks secular culture and "higher Biblical criticism"-somewhat labored and precious...
...Toward the end of her life, she p~it away the Wimsey-Vane fable 9( which is in reality a morality fable) to devote herself almost entirely to :theology...
...The Incarnation, Sayers says, is "the tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten, when he submitted to the conditions he had laid down and became a man like the men he had made, and the men he had made broke and killed him...
...for:, having seemingly pointed his memoir in one direction he steers it in another, a virtually straight chronological account of his appropriation of a slice of,the territory, a transcendence of beginnings that sounds at times like yet another version of the American success story, of making it across the bridge and uptown...
...Brown has demonstrated that modern Biblical scholarship can aid Christian imagination in developing a mature response to the Gospels' most popular story...
...14.95 dDOUBLEDAu I fun all the way I Sicilian immigrants...
...Art is not he--we must not substitute art for God...
...But he was young, a series of lousy jobs and eventually better ones paid the rent...
...It wasn't for long: he was informed his prospects were dim when he blundered into the mistake of referring to a "Jewish socialite," a risible contradiction in terms, as Jews should, and socialites do, know...
...The Church of Rome alone has retained her prestige because she puts theology in the foreground of her teaching...
...implicit in the working out of the complex Wimsey,Vane relationship (particularly in the stunning clas...
...ics Gaudy Night and Busman's Honeymoon) is Sayer's dearly held belief that love of a person.is capable of leading one into love of God, because romantic love convinces one so intensely of the reality and power of Divine love...
...Janie, if you ever come to N.Y., get i~y address from Commonweal--I'd like to meet you...
...elsewhere we shall see face to face, in the place where image and reality are one...
...Sayers frequently confounds her readers...
...Lord Peter, it is interesting to note, also kept his own rules and played fair--it was his just and generous mind that finally won the obdurate, incurably honest Harriet Vane over...
...Whatever game:he is playing with his creationl he has kept his own rules and played fair...
...mentary on the Infancy Narratives in Matthew and Luke l ewOne of the world,s leading Testament scholars Raymond E. Brown THE BIRTH OF THE MESSIAH Winner of the 1977 National Religious Book Award for Scripture...
...She cannot be categorized...
...She is a difficult, dense writer with whom one may profitably contend, but whom one may not dismiss...
...My favorite essay in this collection is "The Other Six Deadly Sins...
...set great store by [and] are in Conspiracy to call virtues...
...Inevitably, given the time~ he drifted into the precincts of the cultural Left--the John Reed Club, the League of American Writers, some 27 October 1978:700...
...I think the last word should be hers: "The great thing, I am sure, is not to be nervous about God--not to try and shut out the Lord Immanuel from any sphere of truth...
...yet this also is he for it is one of his images and therefore reveals his nature...
Vol. 105 • October 1978 • No. 21
