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There was no one  like Dorothy Leigh Sayers. (1893-1957) I have just finished reading a biography, Dorothy L. Sayers, Her Life and Soul, by Barbara Reynolds (1993), and also Sayers first detective story, Clouds of Witness, (1927). (Both of which I recommend.) I don’t think I am using the word too loosely when I say Sayers is a literary genius. I have previously compared her to C.S. Lewis, (Word #20.) They are very much alike and very much not alike. A comparison is most interesting.

I first came across Sayers when I was a high school English teacher. Dante’s Inferno was on the reading list, and I picked her translation because of the publisher’s note. I had no idea what the years ahead would bring. Sayers had written various plays, poems and translations of early and Medieval classics, and I had read some of her Christian writings by the time I finished college after the end of WW11. 

She wrote a version of the Faustus legend, The Devil To Pay, a twelve hour radio version of the life of Christ, The Man Born To  Be King, a radio play, The Emperor Constantine about the shift  in Western history from the Pagan Roman Empire to official Christendom, and all kinds of essays and translations on the Christian life. Her work is truly astonishing. 

The story of her Dante translation is interesting. During the war, the alarms would go off when the German V-2 rockets appeared over London. Everyone would go into the bomb shelters until the all-clear. On one such raid, Sayers picked up at random from her shelves a copy of Dante in the original Latin as she headed for a shelter.  She  started reading and as she waited for the end of the raid, she resolved to write a new translation of the Divine Comedy. She died before it was finished by her friend and biographer, Barbara Reynolds. 

While I owe much to Sayers’ views of the Christian life as set forth in her many post-war essays, I am particularly indebted to her book, The Mind Of The Maker for her view of the Trinity. 

The Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is a central, the central, creed of Christian theology, but what does it mean. No one believes  there are three separate entities, but what do you believe? The (Father of course is God, whatever He is. Obviously, the Son is Jesus. We know that He was once a human man, but was killed, died and buried. He rose again form the dead and ascended into Heaven to be with God. The  Holy Spirit is the third part of the Trinity.

I have never thought much about the Trinity. (I don’t think much about a lot of things.) It has been, therefore, a very important revelation for me to come to the thoughts of Dorothy L. Sayers whose conception of the Trinity has meant much for me. 

Sayers begins with the opening of John’s gospel: “In the beginning.” That also is the opening line in Genesis. “In the beginning.” That’s going back as far as anyone can go. There is nothing before the beginning. In the beginning God was everything. In the beginning God created everything. The human mind cannot grasp that. All we can do is accept that from the beginning there was something, not nothing. (So mucThat something was the cosmic mind, and all that comes from it, namely, the Trinity.

John says that in the beginning was the Word, Logos, the mind.  In the beginning is God. Not a thing, but a mind, the mind of God. and the Word, Logos, became flesh and lived among us. That’s how Sayers explains the Trinity, the same as the first chapter of the Gosel of John. All begins in (A) the Mind of God which is embodied or takes material form in the person of (B) Jesus. That embodiment has an (C) influence in the world. It is Trinity all the way through: Mind, Body, Spirit. That’s how and why and where our world comes from.

Sayers, therefore, postulates; (A) the non-material mind of God as the Father, the first element of the Trinity.  That mind is embodied or manifested in (B) the Son, Jesus, the second element of the Trinity. The (C) life and teachings of Jesus, the third element, go out into the world for my benefit and yours. That is the cosmic Trinity. That is the anchor of my life. It is a very conventional view, but Sayers makes it clear.