The Drama of Dogma: Dorothy Sayers’s Theological Vision in Verse
by Dr. Sara Burt
When I first read The Zeal of Thy House by Dorothy Sayers several years ago, I was not prepared for the spiritual journey I would take. The play challenged me to consider Incarnational doctrine, creativity, purpose, and what it means to work well. Though Dorothy Sayers is well known for the creation of Lord Peter Wimsey and her religious defenses, Sayers also crafted religious plays where Church dogma and art could intersect. These plays ground the Incarnation as the lens through which human creativity, moral failure, and redemption can be reimagined in a culture detached from its theological roots. By anchoring these themes in the Incarnation, Sayers’s plays challenge audiences to reimagine creative work not as an abstract idea, but as participation in a divine narrative.
Like T. S. Eliot and Charles Williams, Sayers wrote historical verse plays (or morality plays) using historical figures as the focused subjects. Where Eliot gives us the martyrdom of Thomas Becket in Murder in the Cathedral, Sayers gives us William of Sens, an architect whose fall—from scaffolding and from pride—becomes metaphorical for us all. Arguing that most laity lacked a general understanding of core doctrine, Sayers emphasized her astonishment at the audience’s ignorance of “a few fundamental Christian dogmas—in particular, the application to human affairs of the doctrine of the Incarnation.”1 To support an education in Church dogma, Sayers used religious verse dramas to foreground her passion for teaching Christian dogma through art.
The “Progressive Man” in Zeal of Thy House
Sayers considers The Zeal of Thy House a “Miracle” play, claiming it “deals with a human situation in the light of the Christian revelation and includes sacred or supernatural characters.”2 According to Sayers, the “human situation” refers to the moral dilemma when tempted to do the right thing for the wrong reason: a blasphemous “spiritual pride.”3
In the wake of the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, the cathedral endures a fire, and its members hire an architect to reconstruct the cathedral’s choir loft. Unlike Thomas Becket with his religiously pious position in Elliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, William of Sens, commissioned to rebuild the choir of Canterbury Cathedral, is a “progressive man” devoted primarily to his craft.4 Admonished as a “great craftsman,” William is also accused of being “a seducer of women” and “taker of bribes.”5 His soliloquies indicate he is, at best, indifferent to a moral standard and, at worst, a man so talented that his morality is irrelevant. Based on a historical event, William falls from scaffolding and is severely injured while working on the reconstruction of the Canterbury Cathedral’s choir loft. This accident ultimately leads to his replacement as the lead architect.
The Sacredness of Work
Whether the cathedral fire and William’s accident are punishments and judgments of God are viable debates. However, Sayers seems more interested in exposing how humans reflect the creative nature of the Creator through retelling this event. Because the Incarnation affirms that God entered human flesh and labor, Sayers invites us to see our work not as secular toil, but as sacred participation in divine creativity through William’s pride and redemption. Sayers reinforces positive convictions concerning creative work and the merit of craftsmanship as the drama unfolds. Work is a blessing, and the play promotes the restorative process of regaining what was lost in the Fall.
Work is a blessing, and the play promotes the restorative process of regaining what was lost in the Fall.
Rooted in Trinitarian theology, Sayers is “trying to say that Man (made a craftsman in the image of the Master-Craftsman) in making a work of art presents also an image of the Triune, because ‘every work of creation’ is three-fold.”6 For Sayers, every task is an echo of Trinitarian creation: the idea (God the Father), the energy (God the Son), and the realization (the Holy Spirit). In one of the most beautiful lines of the play, the Angel Michael echoes this threefold work as “an earthly trinity / to match the heavenly.”7
The Angel Cassiel affirms that “hatred of work must be one of the most depressing consequences of the Fall.”8 According to the play, man should aggressively reclaim work as a sacred duty with eternal value to counter the Fall’s degenerative trigger. Expanding work beyond the means to make a living, Sayers theologically frames work as “the medium in which [man] offers himself to God” but emphasizes the duty “to serve God in his work.”9
The Quality of Work
Sayers does not relinquish us to mediocrity in our creative work. In The Zeal of Thy House, Sayers emphasizes the quality of our work. In the Incarnation, God affirms that the physical world can bear divine presence, countering the argument that creative work lacks eternal meaning and purpose.
Sayers claims that “the only Christian work is good work done well” and that “God is not served by technical incompetence.”10 The first time I read these words, I felt the sting. Sitting in the space between efficiency and quality sometimes seems contradictory, but her commentary reminds us that we are to offer God our best intentions and our excellence. In other words, work poorly executed or of terrible quality makes a mockery of God as His image bearers.
The Choir Brothers and Cathedral Chapter members’ conversation over the cathedral’s reconstruction expose her concern regarding this doctrinal tension. Several members value economic investment, age, and piety, but others prefer to “give the work to a local man.”11 Only a few prize sound structure and skill. For Sayers, creative work ultimately brings glory to God because He embedded creativity into our nature: “No piety in the worker will compensate for the work that is not true to itself; for any work untrue to its technique is living a lie.”12 Good quality work is necessary to rightly hold doctrine and represent religion, which is reflected in the Incarnation.
The Redemption of Work
Interestingly, The Zeal of Thy House also grapples with the Incarnation’s mystery of divine involvement in the material world. Michael’s role as he “bore the flame” that sets the cathedral on fire, Gabriel’s whispers influencing the members’ vote, and Cassiel’s request for Michael to draw his sword and initiate William’s fall exposes direct angelic involvement and demands doctrinal consideration. Intradiegetic commentary suggests a degree of human oblivion to supernatural forces at work, exemplified in the Prior’s deductions after the accident: “I think we sometimes make disasters, and then call them miraculous judgments.”13
Later, the Prior denotes suffering in the presence of sin, and the play seems to focus on the sinful nature of all players. The pilgrims visiting the cathedral are described as “idle men and gadding women” only interested in “gossip,” “dirty stories,” and “a few perfunctory prayers.”14 The monetary need for donations curbs the degree of morality the religious leaders are willing to accept. The Latin monk, Gervase, expresses disgust with the church’s position toward its congregants when he says, “Jealousy, vanity, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness! / And these are churchmen, vowed to holy obedience and humility.”15
Though William of Sens is the most scrutinized for his sin, all players are presented as sinful. This “sin that is so much a part of thee / Thou know'st it not for sin” actually affects each party.16 This pride makes us believe we can be our own judges. If you have ever thought, “I can do this on my own,” then you are in good company—William thought so, too. In her essay, “The Other Six Deadly Sins,” Sayers calls this the sin of pride: “It is the sin which proclaims that Man can produce out of his own wits, and his own impulses, and his own imagination the standards by which he lives: that Man is fitted to be his own judge.”17
However, Sayers’s vision of redemption is not ultimately one of shame but transformation. “As we are, so we make,” she writes.18 If our souls are shaped by faith, then our work, whether building cathedrals or raising children or writing newsletters, will naturally reflect our pursuits.
Sayers writes in one of her letters that humans are “all so involved together in the wrongness that we cannot even do right without hurting each other.”19 Man “chose to know evil” but, through the Incarnation, he has the opportunity to “know your evil as good, / Redeeming that first knowledge.”20 He who is “the image of the Unimaginable / In the place where the Image and the Unimaged are one, / The Act of the Will, the Word of the Thought” takes on humanity’s flesh.21
Sayers writes in one of her letters that humans are “all so involved together in the wrongness that we cannot even do right without hurting each other.”
Ultimately, man is persuaded to trust God’s redemptive purposes in the Incarnational exchange. By taking on human flesh, God redeemed not just our souls, but our crafts. Even William’s flawed, prideful work becomes redeemable because he surrendered it. For Sayers, art should find its construction in the right dogma and doctrine and reflect sound Christian theology. What would it look like to treat our work as sacred acts—not just tasks to complete but work that bears witness to our faith? If Sayers is correct, then the spaces where we work are our altars, the steady transformations of labor into liturgy.
—Dr. Sara Burt currently serves as the Dean of Academics at Central Texas Christian School and teaches English courses in an adjunct capacity for Dallas Baptist University and University of Mary Hardin-Baylor. Sara has served alongside her husband, Jared, for 20 years as a pastor’s wife, and she and Jared have two daughters and two sons. Jared and Sara are regular contract writers for monthly devotional magazines published by LifeWay Christian Resources, Inc., and contract writers for GC2, the publisher for the Baptist General Convention of Texas.
Dorothy Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church: Passionate Arguments for the Relevance of Christian Doctrine (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson, 2004), 16.
Dorothy Sayers, “Types of Christian Drama: With Some Notes on Production,” VII: Journal of the Marion E. Wade Center 2 (1981): 88, www.jstor.org/stable/45296003.
Dorothy Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1937–1943, From Novelist to Playwright, ed. Barbara Reynolds (New York City, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 2:14.
Dorothy Sayers, Four Sacred Plays (Oxford, England: Oxford City Press, 2011), 20.
Ibid, 30, 59.
Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers, 2:45.
Sayers, Four Sacred Plays, 103.
Ibid, 18.
Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church, 135, 138.
Ibid., 140, 142.
Dorothy Sayers, Four Sacred Plays (Oxford City Press, 2011), 19.
Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church, 139.
Sayers, Four Sacred Plays, 74.
Ibid.
Ibid, 80.
Ibid, 94.
Sayers, Letters to a Diminished Church, 99.
Ibid, 145.
Dorothy Sayers, The Letters of Dorothy L. Sayers: 1944-1950, A Noble Daring, ed. Barbara Reynolds (New York City, NY: St. Martin’s Press/The Dorothy L. Sayers Society, 1998), 3:374.
Sayers, Four Sacred Plays, 318-19.
Ibid, 318.