How Do I Love Thee?

I finished the biography of that remarkable woman, Dorothy Leigh Sayers, last night. It is entitled, A Careless Rage for Life, by David Coomes. After I had read her novel, Gaudy Night, I just knew that eventually I would have to know more about the author who wrote not only an entertaining mystery, but also had such penetrating insight to life.

Dorothy was no "Prairie Muffin" and I suspect that Lady Lydia would be horrified at her mannerisms and way of living, not to mention Dorothy's self-confessed vulgarity and earthy approach to life. She lived with a man outside of marriage, bore an illegitimate son by another, and went on to endure an unhappy marriage to a man who refused to allow her to raise her son. Nevertheless, she remains a woman I admire and who exhibited what C.S. Lewis, one of her colleagues and correspondants, called, "...courage and honesty, for the richly feminine qualities which showed through a part and manner superficially masculine and even gleefully ogreish..." Dorothy exemplified the fact that a woman can be feminine in a truly feminine way without the use of crinolines, Victorian tea roses, and lace. And she exhibited a robust faith in God that grew through the trials of life and manifested in scholarly and intellectual pursuits.

The reason I chose the particular title for this post is because it asks the question "HOW" do I love Thee -- with the "thee" referring to God. Not everyone who loves God does so in a manner that is expressed as a "religious emotion." Some Christians are called "cold" in their religion, and indeed, coldness of heart can exist, and it is something we are warned against. At the same time, we must not believe that excess of emotion is the litmus test of sincerity of love and devotion to God. In the parts of the letter that Dorothy wrote to someone on this matter, I think she does a wonderful job in illustrating just how it is one can love God in a manner that is true, honest, and yet unlike how another experiences it. We are not cookie cutter figures made from clay, but individuals with our own expression, calling, and role to fill in life and each of those callings will have peculiar temptations attached to them in terms of the ways in which we can breach our own integrity in fulfilling them. But I'll let Dorothy speak now:

"...I am not by temperament an evangelist. If I were, my thirst for saving souls would overcome all secondary considerations, and my obvious and burning sincereity would at any rate prevent me from appearing smug, whatever else it exposed me to. Charity would cover many mistakes I made. But I have not the passionate love for my fellow-men; I find it very difficult to love them at all, though for the most part I like them and get on with them, and can live with them in kindness if not in charity. This is a defect in me, but it is no use pretending that it does not exist. Evangelism is something to which I do not feel myself called.

"I am quite without the thing known as 'inner light' or 'spiritual experience.' I have never undergone conversion. Neither God, nor (for that matter) angel, devil, ghost or anything else speaks to me out of the depths of my psyche. I cannot go to people and say: 'I know the movements of the spirit from within...'

"It follows naturally, perhaps, from this that I am quite incapable of 'religious emotion'. This has its good as well as its bad side. I am not seriously liable to mistake an aesthetic pleasure in ritual or architecture for moral virtue, or to suppose that shedding a few tears over the pathos of the Crucifixion is the same thing as crucifying the old man in myself. Nor can I readily dismiss religion as a 'sublimation of sex' or anything of the kind, because I know perfectly well that it is nothing of the sort. But the lack of religious emotion in me makes me impatient of it in other people, and makes me appear cold and unsympathetic and impersonal. This is true. I am.

"I have a moral sense. I am not sure that this derives from religious belief... I do not enjoy it. If I ever do a disagreeable duty, it is in the spirit of the young man in the parable who said 'I go not', but afterwards (probably in a detestable temper went grumbling off and did the job. On consideration, I think that the existence andnature of the Christian God is the only rational sanction for the moral sense. But moral sense by itself is not religion -- or at any rate, not Christianity.

"Of all the presuppositions of Christianity , the only one I really have and can swear to from personal inward conviction is sin. About that I have no doubt whatever and never have had. Neither does any doctrine of determinism or psychological maladjustment convince me in the very least that when I do wrong it is not I who do it and that I could not, by some other means or other, do better. The other day I did find myself accounting for not having written a necessary letter to a sick person, thanking her for some feeble poems, on the ground that I had a 'thing' about not telling charitable lies in connection with poetry. In a sense it was true -- I have a 'thing' about that. But the 'inward monitor' said firmly that my behaviour arose from a mixture of sloth and cruelty. It also reminded me, horribly, that on at least two other occasions when I had done exactly the same thing, the sick person had died before my letter went. So (you will be glad to hear) I wrote the letter, which did not take five minutes. But the point is that when anything speaks out of my interior it speaks in the outmoded terms of scholastic theology and faculty psychology, and I do not really know how to establish communication with people who have modern insides.

"But since I cannot come at God through intuition, or through my emotions, or through my 'inner light'... there is only intellect left. And that is a very different matter. You said that I, and the rest of us, gave people the impression of caring only for a dogmatic pattern. That is quite true. I remember once saying to Charles Williams: 'I do not know whether I believe in Christ or whether I am only in love with the pattern.' And Charles said, with his usual prompt understanding, that he had exactly the same doubts about himself. But this you must try to accept: when we say 'in love with the pattern', we mean in love. (Though Charles was different, he did love people, and he was capable of romantic love and I think of a personal love for God in a way that I am not...) The thing is, however, that where the intellect is dominant it becomes the channel of all the other feelings. The 'passionate intellect' is really passionate. It is the only point at which ecstasy can enter. I do not know whether we can be saved through the intellect, but I do know that I can be saved by nothing else. I know that , if there is judgement, I shall have to be able t to say: 'This alone, Lord, in Thee and me, have I never betrayed, and may it suffice to know and love and choose Thee after this manner, for I have no other love, or knowledge, or choice in me'...

"Now if you have borne this far with this egotistical preamble, I will try and come to the point.

"The above is my equipment, as it were.

"By training, I am, more or less, a scholar; by vocation I am a writer of stories and plays. Now, for a persona of that training and equipment there is only one unforgivable sin -- I mean, literally unforgiveable, in that it will end by rotting away one's sense of right and wrong, and that is the falsification of one's 'proper truth'. You may murder your mother and commit adultery five nights a week and still keep a living conscience. But if once you begin to distort facts, or to write things for any purpose other than that of telling such truth as you know, or to affect emotions you do not possess -- then you will begin and slip and slide intio illlusion and into a living Hell, because you will be destroying the only instrument by which you make contact with reality. But it is very difficult-- I cannot tell you how difficult it is, or how insidiously all the good in the world as well as all the evil, conspires to push you into betrayal.

"Look what happens... I wrote detective novels harmlessly and profitably for about twenty years...Then, one day, I was asked to write a play for Canterbury about William of Sens... I liked the story, which could be handled as to deal with the 'proper truth' of the artist -- a thing on which I was then particularly keen. It had to be Christian, of course; and I could see -- indeed I knew well enough -- the besetting sin of the artist: to put himself above the work, which is his special temptation to 'make himself as God'. So I wrote the thing and enjoyed doing it. I never, so help me God , wanted to get entangled in religious apologetic, or to bear witness for Christ, or to proclaim my faith to the world, or anything of that kind. It was an honest piece of work about something I really knew. It was All Right. And still nobody bothered.

"When the show came to London, I couldn't escape the normal Press interviews... And as a result of one of them, I wrote the article 'The Greatest Drama ever Staged'... Well, that was all right too. It merely said that, whether you believed in Christ or not, it was ridiculous to call the story of the Incarnation and Redemption dull. I didn't say more: I could scarcely say less...

"That did it. Apparently the spectacle of a middle-aged female detective-novelist admitting publicly that the judicial murder of God might compete in interest with the corpse in the Coal-Hole was the sensation for which the Christian world was waiting...

"Anyway, from that time... I suppose hardly a week has gone past without at least two demands... that I should write or say something on a religious question... And life become nothing but a desperate struggle to hold on to the rags of one's integrity...

"If you say that you have no knowledge of the subject, they say they quite realise how busy you are and may they ask you again later. If you say that you are a 'creative' writer, and that the writing of treatises and direct doctrinal admonitions saps your energy and ruins your sensitivity, they say that your play did so much good that everybody wants to hear you make a speech... They flatter and press and wheedle and invoke former acquaintance or mutual friends or the needs of the Church and the welfare of society, till to go on saying 'No' is impossible. One writes an article or appears on a platform or answers a letter -- and so one becomes involved, and if one is not desperately careful one finds one's self saying or writing things that are out of one's range or false to one's 'proper truth' -- or else putting together a series of hasty and second -hand commonplaces -- or, unconsciously or even deliberately, exploiting one's own personality. 'What Christ means to me' -- 'How my faith helps my work' -- 'The Life of Prayer' -- 'The Grace of God in Daily life ' -- it is obvious that my type must not write that kind of thing...

"And then there is the terrifying ease by which you may substitute yourself for God, encouraging people to follow you and not Christ. 'They will believe it if you tell them' -- but they must not -- they must believe it only if it is true. 'You can set them a Christian example' -- Yes, by living, not by talking -- and what do they or you know of me? 'They will listen to you when they would not listen to the priests' -- too true: but that is the priest's safeguard and theirs. 'What you say is so different from what the Church says' -- no, no, no! What I say is what the Church says -- only the language is different. Throw my accursed book out of the window: I have nothing to give you but the Creeds. 'But do you believe all these petrifying dogmas?' -- Listen: it does not matter to you whether I believe or how I believe, because my way of belief is probably not yours. But if you will only leave me in peace till some truth so takes hold of me that I can honestly show it to you through the right use of my own medium, then I will make a picture for you that will be the image of that truth: and that will be not the Creeds, but the substance of what is in the Creeds. But unless it is a living truth to me, I cannot make it truth to you: I should be damned, and you would see through it anyhow, bad work cannot be hid...

"I have written a great deal, and perhaps said nothing. But I should like somebody to understand the position of the 'intellectual' Christian when ... he gets caught up in the machine of apologetics. It is useless to blame him for being intellectual -- all his passion, all his sympathies, all his emotions, all his truth, all reality are mediated to him through the intellect, and if you force him out of his contact with reality, he can only deviate into falsehood -- and damning falsheood to his 'proper truth'. He is liable, like other men, to succumb to his own propaganda... but he has the advantage of knowing the danger he stands in. All the same, he is walking a tight-rope the moment you require him to bear a witness that is not absolutely spontaneous, and when he falls, he falls like Lucifer, because he has lost not only Beatrice but Virgil...

"Have I any more to add? Yes, just this. You complain that the books we write are all right for Christians, but not for the heathen, -- all right for highbrows, but no good for lowbrows. Again, that is largely true. But it is precisely the educated near-Christians or woolly Christians we write for. They are our people and the sheep of our pasture. We are not priests, dedicated to the service of all sorts and conditions of men, nor evangelists, called to labour in the foreign mission-field. Our religious writings have necessarily to be addressed to the same set of people who read our other books. That is all we are trained for. I think it very likely that the time has come when we ought to be superseded. I am not quite sure that we ought to be chastized by our even-Christians for not doing that which we are neither called nor fitted for...

"I think it comes to this: that, however urgently a thing may be needed, it can only be rightly demanded of those who can rightly give it. for the others are bound to falsify and so commit the greatest treason: to do the right thing for the wrong reason. And, by the time you have done it, you know it is no longer the right thing."