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Title: The Greatest Drama Ever Staged
Author: Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957)
Date of first publication: May, 1938
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Hodder and Stoughton, June, 1938
Date first posted: 22 March 2008
Date last updated: 22 March 2008
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #99

This ebook was produced by: Dr Mark Bear Akrigg


=Transcriber's note:=

A table of contents, not present in the original printed
edition, has been added to this digital edition.




    THE
    GREATEST DRAMA
    EVER STAGED

    BY
    DOROTHY L. SAYERS




    LONDON

    HODDER AND STOUGHTON

    _First Printed - May, 1938_
    _Reprinted - June, 1938_

_Made and Printed in Great Britain for Hodder & Stoughton
Limited, by Wyman & Sons Limited, London, Reading
and Fakenham_


_CONTENTS__

  I. The Greatest Drama Ever Staged
  II. The Triumph of Easter




THE GREATEST DRAMA EVER STAGED

     IS THE OFFICIAL CREED OF CHRISTENDOM


Official Christianity, of late years, has been having what
is known as "a bad press." We are constantly assured that
the churches are empty because preachers insist too much
upon doctrine--"dull dogma," as people call it. The fact is
the precise opposite. It is the neglect of dogma that makes
for dullness. The Christian faith is the most exciting drama
that ever staggered the imagination of man--and the dogma is
the drama.

That drama is summarised quite clearly in the creeds of the
Church, and if we think it dull it is because we either have
never really read those amazing documents, or have recited
them so often and so mechanically as to have lost all sense
of their meaning. The plot pivots upon a single character,
and the whole action is the answer to a single central
problem: _What think ye of Christ?_ Before we adopt any of
the unofficial solutions (some of which are indeed
excessively dull)--before we dismiss Christ as a myth, an
idealist, a demagogue, a liar or a lunatic--it will do no
harm to find out what the creeds really say about Him. What
does the Church think of Christ?

The Church's answer is categorical and uncompromising, and
it is this: That Jesus Bar-Joseph, the carpenter of
Nazareth, was in fact and in truth, and in the most exact
and literal sense of the words, the God "by Whom all things
were made." His body and brain were those of a common man;
His personality was the personality of God, so far as that
personality could be expressed in human terms. He was not a
kind of dmon or fairy pretending to be human; He was in
every respect a genuine living man. He was not merely a man
so good as to be "like God"--He _was_ God.

Now, this is not just a pious commonplace; it is not
commonplace at all. For what it means is this, among other
things: that for whatever reason God chose to make man as he
is--limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and
death--He had the honesty and the courage to take His own
medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He
has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing
from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has
Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the
trivial irritations of family life and the cramping
restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst
horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death.
When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty
and died in disgrace and thought it well worth while.

Christianity is, of course, not the only religion that has
found the best explanation of human life in the idea of an
incarnate and suffering god. The Egyptian Osiris died and
rose again; schylus in his play, _The Eumenides_,
reconciled man to God by the theory of a suffering Zeus. But
in most theologies, the god is supposed to have suffered and
died in some remote and mythical period of pre-history. The
Christian story, on the other hand, starts off briskly in
St. Matthew's account with a place and a date: "When Jesus
was born in Bethlehem of Juda in the days of Herod the
King." St. Luke, still more practically and prosaically,
pins the thing down by a reference to a piece of government
finance. God, he says, was made man in the year when Csar
Augustus was taking a census in connection with a scheme of
taxation. Similarly, we might date an event by saying that
it took place in the year that Great Britain went off the
gold standard. About thirty-three years later (we are
informed) God was executed, for being a political nuisance,
"under Pontius Pilate "--much as we might say, "when Mr.
Joynson-Hicks was Home Secretary." It is as definite and
concrete as all that.

Possibly we might prefer not to take this tale too
seriously--there are disquieting points about it. Here we
had a man of Divine character walking and talking among
us--and what did we find to do with Him? The common people,
indeed, "heard Him gladly"; but our leading authorities in
Church and State considered that He talked too much and
uttered too many disconcerting truths. So we bribed one of
His friends to hand Him over quietly to the police, and we
tried Him on a rather vague charge of creating a
disturbance, and had Him publicly flogged and hanged on the
common gallows, "thanking God we were rid of a knave." All
this was not very creditable to us, even if He was (as many
people thought and think) only a harmless crazy preacher.
But if the Church is right about Him, it was more
discreditable still ; for the man we hanged was God
Almighty.

So that is the outline of the official story--the tale of
the time when God was the under-dog 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
Him and killed Him. This is the dogma we find so dull--this
terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero.

If this is dull, then what, in Heaven's name, is worthy to
be called exciting? The people who hanged Christ never, to
do them justice, accused Him of being a bore--on the
contrary; they thought Him too dynamic to be safe. It has
been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering
personality and surround Him with an atmosphere of tedium.
We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of
Judah, certified Him "meek and mild," and recommended Him as
a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old
ladies. To those who knew Him, however, He in no way
suggested a milk-and-water person; _they_ objected to Him
as a dangerous firebrand. True, He was tender to the
unfortunate, patient with honest inquirers and humble before
Heaven; but He insulted respectable clergymen by calling
them hypocrites; He referred to King Herod as "that fox"; He
went to parties in disreputable company and was looked upon
as a "gluttonous man and a wine-bibber, a friend of
publicans and sinners"; He assaulted indignant tradesmen and
threw them and their belongings out of the Temple; He drove
a coach-and-horses through a number of sacrosanct and hoary
regulations; He cured diseases by any means that came handy,
with a shocking casualness in the matter of other people's
pigs and property; He showed no proper deference for wealth
or social position; when confronted with neat dialectical
traps, He displayed a paradoxical humour that affronted
serious-minded people, and He retorted by asking
disagreeably searching questions that could not be answered
by rule of thumb. He was emphatically not a dull man in His
human lifetime, and if He was God, there can be nothing dull
about God either. But He had "a daily beauty in His life
that made us ugly," and officialdom felt that the
established order of things would be more secure without
Him. So they did away with God in the name of peace and
quietness.

"_And the third day He rose again_"; what are we to make of
that? One thing is certain: if He was God and nothing else,
His immortality means nothing to us; if He was man and no
more, His death is no more important than yours or mine. But
if He really was both God and man, then when the man Jesus
died, God died too, and when the God Jesus rose from the
dead, man rose too, because they were one and the same
person. The Church binds us to no theory about the exact
composition of Christ's Resurrection Body. A body of some
kind there had to be, since man cannot perceive the Infinite
otherwise than in terms of space and time. It may have been
made from the same elements as the body that disappeared so
strangely from the guarded tomb, but it was not that old,
limited, mortal body, though it was recognisably like it. In
any case, those who saw the risen Christ remained persuaded
that life was worth living and death a triviality--an
attitude curiously unlike that of the modern defeatist, who
is firmly persuaded that life is a disaster and death
(rather inconsistently) a major catastrophe.

Now, nobody is compelled to believe a single word of this
remarkable story. God (says the Church) has created us
perfectly free to disbelieve in Him as much as we choose. If
we do disbelieve, then He and we must take the consequences
in a world ruled by cause and effect. The Church says
further, that man did, in fact, disbelieve, and that God
did, in fact, take the consequences. All the same, if we are
going to disbelieve a thing, it seems on the whole to be
desirable that we should first find out what, exactly, we
are disbelieving. Very well, then: "The right Faith is, that
we believe that Jesus Christ is God and Man. Perfect God and
perfect Man, of a reasonable soul and human flesh
subsisting. Who although He be God and Man, yet is He not
two, but one Christ." There is the essential doctrine, of
which the whole elaborate structure of Christian faith and
morals is only the logical consequence.

Now, we may call that doctrine exhilarating or we may call
it devastating; we may call it revelation or we may call it
rubbish; but if we call it dull, then words have no meaning
at all. That God should play the tyrant over man is a dismal
story of unrelieved oppression; that man should play the
tyrant over man is the usual dreary record of human
futility; but that man should play the tyrant over God and
find Him a better man than himself is an astonishing drama
indeed. Any journalist, hearing of it for the first time,
would recognise it as News; those who did hear it for the
first time actually called it News, and good news at that;
though we are apt to forget that the word Gospel ever meant
anything so sensational.

Perhaps the drama is played out now, and Jesus is safely
dead and buried. Perhaps. It is ironical and entertaining to
consider that once at least in the world's history those
words might have been spoken with complete conviction, and
that was upon the eve of the Resurrection.




THE TRIUMPH OF EASTER


"_O FELIX CULPA!_" said Augustine of Hippo, rather
dangerously, with reference to the sin of Adam. "O happy
guilt, that did deserve such and so great a Redeemer!"

It is difficult, perhaps, to imagine a pronouncement that
lays itself more open to misunderstanding. It is the kind of
paradox that bishops and clergy are warned to beware of
uttering from the pulpit. But, then, the Bishop of Hippo was
a very remarkable bishop indeed, with a courage of his
convictions rare in highly-placed ecclesiastical persons.

If spiritual pastors are to refrain from saying anything
that might ever, by any possibility, be misunderstood by
anybody, they will end--as in fact many of them do--by never
saying anything worth hearing. Incidentally, this particular
brand of timidity is the besetting sin of the good
churchman. Not that the Church approves it. She knows it of
old for a part of the great, sprawling, drowsy, deadly Sin
of Sloth--a sin from which the preachers of fads, schisms,
heresies and anti-Christ are most laudably free.

The children of this world are not only (as Christ so
caustically observed) wiser in their generation than the
children of light; they are also more energetic, more
stimulating and bolder. It is always, of course, more
amusing to attack than to defend; but good Christian people
should have learnt by now that it is best to defend by
attacking, seeing that the Kingdom of Heaven suffereth
violence, and the violent take it by force. St. Augustine,
anyway, seeing the perpetual problem of sin and evil being
brought up and planted, like a battery, against the
Christian position, sallied promptly forth, like the good
strategist he was, and spiked its guns with a thanksgiving.

The problem of sin and evil is, as everybody knows, one
which all religions have to face, especially those that
postulate an all-good and all-powerful God. "If," we say
readily, "God is holy and omnipotent, He would interfere and
stop all this kind of thing"--meaning by "this kind of
thing" wars, persecutions, cruelties, Hitlerism, Bolshevism,
or whatever large issue happens to be distressing our minds
at the time. But let us be quite sure that we have really
considered the problem in all its aspects.

"Why doesn't God smite this dictator dead?" is a question a
little remote from us. Why, madam, did He not strike you
dumb and imbecile before you uttered that baseless and
unkind slander the day before yesterday? Or me, before I
behaved with such cruel lack of consideration to that
well-meaning friend? And why, sir, did He not cause your
hand to rot off at the wrist before you signed your name to
that dirty little bit of financial trickery?

You did not quite mean that? But why not? Your misdeeds and
mine are none the less repellent because our opportunities
for doing damage are less spectacular than those of some
other people. Do you suggest that your doings and mine are
too trivial for God to bother about? That cuts both ways;
for, in that case, it would make precious little difference
to His creation if He wiped us both out to-morrow.

Well, perhaps that is not quite what we meant. We meant why
did God create His universe on these lines at all? Why did
He not make us mere puppets, incapable of executing anything
but His own pattern of perfection? Some schools of thought
assert that He did, that everything we do (including
Jew-baiting in Germany and our own disgusting rudeness to
Aunt Eliza) is rigidly determined for us, and that, however
much we may dislike the pattern, we can do nothing about it.
This is one of those theories that are supposed to free us
from the trammels of superstition. It certainly relieves our
minds of all responsibility; unfortunately, it imposes a
fresh set of trammels of its own. Also, however much we may
believe in it, we seem forced to behave as though we did
not.

Christians (surprising as it may appear) are not the only
people who fail to act up to their creed; for what
determinist philosopher, when his breakfast bacon is
uneatable, will not blame the free will of the cook, like
any Christian? To be sure, the philosopher's protest, like
his bacon, is pre-determined also; that is the silly part of
it. Our minds are the material we have to work upon when
constructing philosophies, and it seems but an illogical
creed, whose proof depends on our discarding all the
available evidence.

The Church, at any rate, says that man's will is free, and
that evil is the price we pay for knowledge, particularly
the kind of knowledge which we call self-consciousness. It
follows that we can, by God's grace, do something about the
pattern. Moreover, God Himself, says the Church, is doing
something about it--with our co-operation, if we choose, in
despite of us if we refuse to co-operate--but always,
steadily, working the pattern out.

And here we come up against the ultimate question which no
theology, no philosophy, no theory of the universe has ever
so much as attempted to answer completely. Why should God,
if there is a God, create anything, at any time, of any kind
at all? That is a real mystery, and probably the only
completely insoluble mystery there is. The one person who
might be able to give some sort of guess at the answer is
the creative artist, and he, of all people in the world, is
the least inclined even to ask the question, being
accustomed to take all creative activity as its own
sufficient justification.

But we may all, perhaps, allow that it is easier to believe
the universe to have come into existence for some reason
than for no reason at all. The Church asserts that there is
a Mind which made the universe, that He made it because He
is the sort of Mind that takes pleasure in creation, and
that if we want to know what the Mind of the Creator is, we
must look at Christ. In Him, we shall discover a Mind that
loved His own creation so completely that He became part of
it, suffered with and for it, and made it a sharer in His
own glory and a fellow-worker with Himself in the working
out of His own design for it.

That is the bold postulate that the Church asks us to
accept, adding that, if we do accept it (and every
theoretical scheme demands the acceptance of some postulate
or other) the answers to all our other problems will be
found to make sense.

Accepting the postulate, then, and looking at Christ, what
do we find God "doing about" this business of sin and evil?
And what is He expecting us to do about it? Here, the Church
is clear enough. We find God continually at work turning
evil into good. Not, as a rule, by irrelevant miracles and
theatrically effective judgments--Christ was seldom very
encouraging to those who demanded signs, or lightnings from
Heaven, and God is too subtle and too economical a craftsman
to make very much use of those methods. But He takes our
sins and errors and turns them into victories, as He made
the crime of the crucifixion to be the salvation of the
world. "_O felix culpa!_" exclaimed St. Augustine,
contemplating the accomplished work.

Here is the place where we are exceedingly liable to run
into misunderstanding. God does not need our sin, still less
does He make us sin, in order to demonstrate His power and
glory. His is not the uneasy power that has to reassure
itself by demonstrations. Nor is it desirable that we should
create evils on purpose for the fun of seeing Him put them
right. That is not the idea at all. Nor yet are we to
imagine that evil does not matter, since God can make it all
right in the long run.

Whatever the Church preaches on this point, it is _not_ a
facile optimism. And it is not the advisability of doing
evil that good may come. Over-simplification of this sort is
as misleading as too much complication and just as
perilously attractive. It is, for instance, startling and
illuminating to hear a surgeon say casually, when
congratulated upon some miracle of healing, "Of course, we
couldn't have done that operation without the experience we
gained in the War."

There is a good result of evil; but, even if the number of
sufferers healed were to exceed that of all the victims who
suffered in the War, does that allay the pangs of the
victims or of any one of them, or excuse the guilt that
makes war possible? No, says the Church, it does not. If an
artist discovers that the experience gained through his
worst sins enables him to produce his best work, does that
entitle him to live like a beast for the sake of his art?
No, says the Church, it does not. We can behave as badly as
we like, but we cannot escape the consequences. "Take what
you will, said God" (according to the Spanish proverb) "take
it and pay for it." Or somebody else may do the paying and
pay fully, willingly and magnificently, but the debt is
still ours. "The Son of man goeth as it is written of Him;
but woe unto that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! it
had been good for that man if he had not been born."

When Judas sinned, Jesus paid; He brought good out of evil,
He led out triumph from the gates of hell and brought all
mankind out with Him; but the suffering of Jesus and the sin
of Judas remain a reality. God did not abolish the fact of
evil: He transformed it. He did not stop the crucifixion: He
rose from the dead.

"Then Judas, which had betrayed Him, when he saw that He was
condemned,... cast down the pieces of silver in the temple,
and departed, and went and hanged himself." And thereby
Judas committed the final, the fatal, the most pitiful error
of all; for he despaired of God and himself and never waited
to see the Resurrection. Had he done so, there would have
been an encounter, and an opportunity, to leave invention
bankrupt; but unhappily for himself, he did not. In this
world, at any rate, he never saw the triumph of Christ
fulfilled upon him, and through him, and despite of him. He
saw the dreadful payment made, and never knew what victory
had been purchased with the price.

All of us, perhaps, are too ready, when our behaviour turns
out to have appalling consequences, to rush out and hang
ourselves. Sometimes we do worse, and show an inclination to
go and hang other people. Judas, at least, seems to have
blamed nobody but himself, and St. Peter, who had a minor
betrayal of his own to weep for, made his act of contrition
and waited to see what came next. What came next for St.
Peter and the other disciples was the sudden assurance of
what God was, and with it the answer to all the riddles.

If Christ could take evil and suffering and do that sort of
thing with them, then of course it was all worth while, and
the triumph of Easter linked up with that strange,
triumphant prayer in the Upper Room, which the events of
Good Friday had seemed to make so puzzling. As for their own
parts in the drama, nothing could now alter the fact that
they had been stupid, cowardly, faithless, and in many ways
singularly unhelpful; but they did not allow any morbid and
egotistical remorse to inhibit their joyful activities in
the future.

Now, indeed, they could go out and "do something" about the
problem of sin and suffering. They had seen the strong hands
of God twist the crown of thorns into a crown of glory, and
in hands as strong as that they knew themselves safe. They
had misunderstood practically everything Christ had ever
said to them, but no matter: the thing made sense at last,
and the meaning was far beyond anything they had dreamed.
They had expected a walk-over, and they beheld a victory;
they had expected an earthly Messiah, and they beheld the
Soul of Eternity.

It had been said to them of old time, "No man shall look
upon My face and live"; but for them a means had been found.
They had seen the face of the living God turned upon them;
and it was the face of a suffering and rejoicing Man.




[End of _The Greatest Drama Ever Staged_ by Dorothy L. Sayers]