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BOOK REVIEW: Creed or Chaos?
by Dorothy L. Sayers
Sophia Institute Press - 191 pp., $14.95.
The story of the Incarnation is the "tale of the time when God was the underdog and got beaten..." Thus does Dorothy Sayers begin to recount the Christian Creed's thunderous dogma of the world's Creator coming into His world to save it. Dogmas, those truths revealed by God and adhered to by the members of His Church, are necessarily dramatic because they contain the actions of an almighty God who becomes an infant, choosing to lie helpless in the cold night crying for the love of His creatures. From this central truth of the Incarnation implications flow which affect every part of human life. That is why, Sayers says, the dogmas of Christianity are the foundation stones on which man's attitude toward creation must be built. If God became man to suffer and laugh and work and speak to other men, then there is really no more astonishing or instructive reality in history than this one. Nor is there a more exciting one, for, as Sayers comments, "He was emphatically not a dull man in his human lifetime, and if he was God, there can be nothing dull about God either."
Recently reissued by Sophia Press, Creed or Chaos is a collection of speeches and essays which Sayers wrote during the Second World War. After graduating from Oxford in 1912, Sayers began a varied career as an ad writer, a playwright, a scholar, and a novelist. She writes with a grace that has earned her a reputation for both clarity and originality of thought, a grace that received international recognition with her translations of The Song of Roland and The Divine Comedy.
Sophia Press is a small publishing house trying to provide books of uncommon wisdom in a quality format. The reissue of this work by Sayers fits in admirably with their stated purpose of helping to "restore man's knowledge of eternal truth."
What most characterizes Sayers' style is an ability to leave platitude aside and express striking truths strikingly. She brings all of her piquant brilliance to an understanding of the implications of Christ's Incarnation. That Christ, the God through whom all things were made, who comes down from heaven to walk the streets of Nazareth and fashion exquisitely crafted tables made of wood, is worth contemplating, hardly needs to be said to Christians, but Sayers points out that many, perhaps most, Christians are ignorant of the theology of their religion and instead settle for a mixture of "sentimentalism and slipshod thinking."
As her title suggests, there is literally no reasonable alternative to the carefully thought out truth of things as handed on by Christ's Church, a Church established by the Creator who loves His creatures to distraction, in fact loves them enough to give up His life for their sake. The Creed is the concise expression of these truths which must be accepted because they express the wonderful way things are; they are the most relevant truths for anyone who is human because to be ignorant of them is to be unaware of how to live. Sayers expresses the point with a query: "If Christian dogma is irrelevant to life, to what, in Heaven's name is it relevant? - since religious dogma is in fact nothing but a statement of doctrines concerning the nature of life and the universe."
Although Sayers' essays are all elaborations on the dogmas of Christianity she approaches these dogmas from a variety of angles. In one instance she shows how much of the present dissatisfaction with work is traceable to a false view of work as punishment for original sin. In fact, work is what men were created to do but the work was made irksome by the effects of the Fall. God creates and so does the creature whom He makes in His image. Man's desire and need to work is a result of what he is, not something added on as an afterthought to keep him busy.
Some of the other essays in the book explain how the material world is good because it comes from the hand of the all-good God, how God works with His free creatures to bring good out of evil --"The only way to deal with the past is to accept the whole past, and by accepting it, to change its meaning," and the necessary connection between what a man thinks about the world and how he acts in it. This last idea underscores the importance of true dogmas for any one who wants to live in harmony with the rest of creation.
The final essay featured in Sayer's book is entitled "The Other Seven Deadly Sins." Here she makes a useful distinction by contrasting the "warm-hearted sins," there are three: lust, gluttony, and anger; and the "cold-hearted" remaining four: avarice, envy, sloth and pride. By focusing attention away from lust, the most attention-getting sin, and toward the four less famous but equally deadly "cold" sins, Sayers shows how modern industrial societies have sometimes embraced avarice under the name of enterprise and envy under the name of egalitarian principle. Sayers thinks that sin often disguises itself as virtue and thereby appeals more to fallen mankind bent on sinning but desirous of covering up the more obvious public sins. Here is where the importance of dogma accurately stated, in other words - a Creed, is essential to the correct naming of things and the preservation of an unclouded vision of reality. Sayers points to the Church as the maternal corrective for all our attempts to parade vice disguised as virtue because "whatever disguise the sins assume, the Church knows the right names for all of them."
A devout Anglican her whole life, Sayers gives credit to the Roman Church alone for its insistence on the primacy of an ever deepening theology as the groundwork for understanding and acting in the world. The pope who heads the Roman Church as it approaches the third millennium has said that if one listens closely, the universe echoes with the "beating of a great heart." It is the heart of a God who creates and loves, giving His creatures the power to do likewise. Creed or Chaos is an eloquent elaboration of the theme that this Heart which is Divine became human and asks us to believe in Him for our own happiness.
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