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Title: Strong Meat
Author: Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957)
Date of first publication: 1939
Place and date of edition used as base for this ebook:
   London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1939 (First Edition)
Date first posted: 6 February 2008
Date last updated: 6 February 2008
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #77

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.

Towards the middle of the first essay, "Strong Meat",
our author discusses and assumes familiarity with
J. B. Priestley's 1937 play _Time and the Conways__.
At the time of this ebook's creation, a description of this
play was conveniently available at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_and_the_Conways




STRONG MEAT
6d net




Also by DOROTHY L. SAYERS

THE GREATEST DRAMA EVER STAGED

Uniform with "Strong Meat."

"In a masterly pamphlet, Miss Sayers proceeds, with wit and
flashing insight, to make good the claim that the greatest
drama ever staged is the official creed of Christendom, and
to show that it is not dogma but 'the neglect of dogma that
makes for dullness.'"

_The Guardian._

HODDER & STOUGHTON




    STRONG MEAT

    BY
    DOROTHY L. SAYERS


"For every one that useth milk is unskilful in the word of
righteousness; for he is a babe.

"But strong meat belongeth to them that are of full age,
even those who by reason of use have their senses exercised
to discern both good and evil."

--Epistle to the Hebrews




    LONDON

    HODDER AND STOUGHTON

_First published in book form - June, 1939_

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


_CONTENTS__

I. Strong Meat
II. The Dogma is the Drama




STRONG MEAT


It is over twenty years since I first read the words, in
some forgotten book. I remember neither the name of the
author, nor that of the Saint from whose meditations he was
quoting.[1] Only the statement itself has survived the
accidents of transmission: "_Cibus sum grandium; cresce, et
manducabis Me_"--"I am the food of the full-grown; become a
man, and thou shalt feed on Me."

[Footnote 1: But I would have laid any odds, from the style,
that it was Augustine of Hippo; and so, indeed, it proves to
be (_Confessions_: vii.10).]

Here is a robust assertion of the claim of Christianity to
be a religion for adult minds. I am glad to think, _now_,
that it impressed me so forcibly _then_, when I was still
comparatively young. To protest, when one has left one's
youth behind, against the prevalent assumption that there is
no salvation for the middle-aged is all very well; but it is
apt to provoke a mocking reference to the fox who lost his
tail. One is in a stronger position if one can show that one
had already registered the protest before circumstances
rendered it expedient.

There is a popular school of thought (or, more strictly, of
feeling) which violently resents the operation of Time upon
the human spirit. It looks upon age as something between a
crime and an insult. Its prophets have banished from their
savage vocabulary all such words as "adult," "mature,"
"experienced," "venerable"; they know only snarling and
sneering epithets, like "middle-aged," "elderly," "stuffy,"
"senile" and "decrepit." With these they flagellate that
which they themselves are, or must shortly become, as though
abuse were an incantation to exorcise the inexorable. Theirs
is neither the thoughtless courage that "makes mouths at the
invisible event," nor the reasoned courage that foresees the
event and endures it; still less is it the ecstatic courage
that embraces and subdues the event. It is the vicious and
desperate fury of a trapped beast; and it is not a pretty
sight.

Such men, finding no value for the world as it is, proclaim
very loudly their faith in the future, "which is in the
hands of the young." With this flattery, they bind their own
burden on the shoulders of the next generation. For their
own failures, Time alone is to blame--not Sin, which is
expiable, but Time, which is irreparable. From the
relentless reality of age they seek escape into a fantasy of
youth--their own or other people's. First love, boyhood
ideals, childish dreams, the song at the mother's breast,
the blind security of the womb--from these they construct a
monstrous fabric of pretence, to be their hiding-place from
the tempest. Their faith is not really in the future, but in
the past. Paradoxical as it may seem, to believe in youth is
to look backward; to look forward, we must believe in age.
"Except," said Christ, "ye become as little children"--and
the words are sometimes quoted to justify the flight into
infantilism. Now, children differ in many ways, but they
have one thing in common. Peter Pan--if indeed he exists
otherwise than in the nostalgic imagination of an adult--is
a case for the pathologist. All normal children (however
much we discourage them) look forward to growing up. "Except
ye become as little children," except you can wake on your
fiftieth birthday with the same forward-looking excitement
and interest in life that you enjoyed when you were five,
"ye cannot see the Kingdom of God." One must not only die
daily, but every day one must be born again.

"How can a man be born when he is old?" asked Nicodemus. His
question has been ridiculed; but it is very reasonable and
even profound. "Can he enter a second time into his mother's
womb and be born?" Can he escape from Time, creep back into
the comfortable pre-natal darkness, renounce the values of
experience ? The answer makes short work of all such
fantasies. "That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and
that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." The spirit
alone is eternal youth; the mind and the body must learn to
make terms with Time.

Time is a difficult subject for thought, because in a sense
we know too much about it. It is perhaps the only phenomenon
of which we have direct apprehension; if all our senses were
destroyed, we should still remain aware of duration.
Moreover, all conscious thought is a process in time; so
that to think consciously about Time is like trying to use a
foot-rule to measure its own length. The awareness of
timelessness, which some people have, does not belong to the
order of conscious thought and cannot be directly expressed
in the language of conscious thought, which is temporal. For
every conscious human purpose (including thought) we are
compelled to reckon (in every sense of the word) with Time.

Now, the Christian Church has always taken a thoroughly
realistic view of Time, and has been very particular to
distinguish between Time and Eternity. In her view of the
matter, Time is not an aspect or a fragment of Eternity, nor
is Eternity an endless extension of Time; the two concepts
belong to different categories. Both have a divine reality:
God is the Ancient of Days and also the I AM: the
Everlasting, and also the Eternal Present; the Logos and
also the Father; the Creeds, with their usual practicality,
issue a sharp warning that we shall get into a nasty mess if
we confuse the two or deny the reality of either. Moreover,
the mystics--those rare spirits who are simultaneously aware
of Time and Eternity--support the doctrine by their knowledge
and example. They are never vague, woolly-minded people to
whom Time means nothing; on the contrary, they insist more
than anybody upon the validity of Time and the actuality of
human experience.

The reality of Time is not affected by considering it as a
dimension in a space-time continuum or as a solid having
dimensions of its own. "There's a great devil in the
universe," says Kay in _Time and the Conways_, "and we call
it Time.... If things were merely mixed--good and bad--that
would be all right, but they get worse.... Time's beating
us." Her brother replies that Time is "only a kind of
dream," and that the "happy young Conways of the past" are
still real and existing. "We're seeing another bit of the
view--a bad bit if you like--but the whole landscape's still
there.... At this moment, or any moment, we're only a
cross-section of our real selves. What we _really_ are is
the whole stretch of ourselves, all our time, and when we
come to the end of this life, all our time will be
_us_--the real you, the real me."

Granted all this--that the happy young Conways still
co-exist, _now_, with the unhappy, middle-aged Conways;
granted also the converse--that the unhappy, middle-aged
Conways already co-existed, _then_, with the happy young
Conways. What of it? All we have done is to substitute a
spatial image for a temporal one. Instead of a _progress_
from good to evil we have a _prospect_ (or "landscape") of
mixed good and evil, which, viewed in its entirety ("when we
come to the end of this life") must necessarily contain more
evil than good, since things "get worse and worse." Kay may
find this "all right"; the fact remains that there is here
no conquest over Time, but an unconditional surrender.

That surrender is made in the moment when we assume that
Time is evil in itself and brings nothing but deterioration.
It is a pity that the Conway family contained no saint, no
artist, no one who had achieved any measure of triumphant
fulfilment. His opinion would have been of great interest,
since he might have spoken with authority of the soul's
development in Time, of the vigorous grappling with evil
that transforms it into good, of the dark night of the soul
that precedes crucifixion and issues in resurrection.

In contending with the problem of evil it is useless to try
to escape either _from_ the bad past or _into_ the good
past. The only way to deal with the past is to accept the
whole past, and by accepting it, to change its meaning. The
hero of T. S. Eliot's _The Family Reunion_, haunted by the
guilt of a hereditary evil, seeks at first "To creep back
through the little door" into the shelter of the unaltered
past, and finds no refuge there from the pursuing hounds of
heaven. "Now I know That the last apparent refuge, the safe
shelter, That is where one meets them; that is the way of
spectres...." So long as he flees from Time and Evil he is
thrall to them, not till he welcomes them does he find
strength to transmute them. "And now I know That my business
is not to run away, but to pursue, Not to avoid being found,
but to seek.... It is at once the hardest thing, and the
only thing possible. Now they will lead me; I shall be safe
with them. I am not safe here.... I must follow the bright
angels." Then, and only then, is he enabled to apprehend the
good in the evil and to see the terrible hunters of the soul
in their true angelic shape. "I feel quite happy, as if
happiness Did not consist in getting what one wanted, Or in
getting rid of what can't be got rid of, But in a different
vision." It is the release, not from, but into, Reality.

This is the great way of Christian acceptance--a very
different thing from so-called "Christian" resignation,
which merely submits without ecstasy. "Repentance," says a
Christian writer[2], "is no more than a passionate intention
to know all things after the mode of Heaven, and it is
impossible to know evil as good if you insist on knowing it
as evil." For man's evil knowledge, "there could be but one
perfect remedy--to know the evil of the past itself as good,
and to be free from the necessity of evil in the future--to
find right knowledge and perfect freedom together; to know
all things as occasions of love."

[Footnote 2: Charles Williams: _He Came Down from Heaven_.]

The story of Passion-Tide and Easter is the story of the
winning of that freedom and of that victory over the evils
of Time. The burden of the guilt is accepted ("He was made
Sin") the last agony of alienation from God is passed
through (_Eloi, lama sabachthani_); the temporal Body is
broken and remade; and Time and Eternity are reconciled in a
Single Person. There is no retreat here to the Paradise of
primal ignorance; the new Kingdom of God is built upon the
foundations of spiritual experience. Time is not denied; it
is fulfilled. "I am the food of the full-grown."




THE DOGMA IS THE DRAMA


"Any stigma," said a witty tongue, "will do to beat a dogma";
and the flails of ridicule have been brandished with such
energy of late on the threshing-floor of controversy that
the true seed of the Word has become well-nigh lost amid the
whirling of chaff. Christ, in His Divine innocence, said to
the Woman of Samaria, "Ye worship ye know not what"--being
apparently under the impression that it might be desirable,
on the whole, to know what one was worshipping. He thus
showed Himself sadly out of touch with the twentieth-century
mind, for the cry to-day is: "Away with the tedious
complexities of dogma--let us have the simple spirit of
worship; just worship, no matter of what!" The only drawback
to this demand for a generalised and undirected worship is
the practical difficulty of arousing any sort of enthusiasm
for the worship of nothing in particular.

It would not perhaps be altogether surprising if, in this
nominally Christian country, where the Creeds are daily
recited, there were a number of people who knew all about
Christian doctrine and disliked it. It is more startling to
discover how many people there are who heartily dislike and
despise Christianity without having the faintest notion what
it is. If you tell them, they cannot believe you. I do not
mean that they cannot believe the doctrine: that would be
understandable enough, since it takes some believing. I mean
that they simply cannot believe that anything so
interesting, so exciting and so dramatic can be the orthodox
Creed of the Church.

That this is really the case was made plain to me by the
questions asked me, mostly by young men, about my Canterbury
play, THE ZEAL OF THY HOUSE. The action of the play involves
a dramatic presentation of a few fundamental Christian
dogmas--in particular, the application to human affairs of
the doctrine of the Incarnation. That the Church believed
Christ to be in any _real_ sense God, or that the Eternal
Word was supposed to be associated in any way with the work
of Creation; that Christ was held to be at the same time Man
in any _real_ sense of the word; that the doctrine of the
Trinity could be considered to have any relation to fact or
any bearing on psychological truth; that the Church
considered Pride to be sinful, or indeed took notice of any
sin beyond the more disreputable sins of the flesh:--all
these things were looked upon as astonishing and
revolutionary novelties, imported into the Faith by the
feverish imagination of a playwright. I protested in vain
against this flattering tribute to my powers of invention,
referring my inquirers to the Creeds, to the Gospels and to
the offices of the Church; I insisted that if my play was
dramatic it was so, not in spite of the dogma but because of
it--that, in short, the dogma _was_ the drama. The
explanation was, however, not well received; it was felt
that if there was anything attractive in Christian
philosophy I must have put it there myself.

Judging by what my young friends tell me and also by what is
said on the subject in anti-Christian literature written by
people who ought to have taken a little trouble to find out
what they are attacking before attacking it, I have come to
the conclusion that a short examination paper on the
Christian religion might be very generally answered as
follows:

_Q.:_ What does the Church think of God the Father?

_A.:_ He is omnipotent and holy. He created the world and
imposed on man conditions impossible of fulfilment; He is
very angry if these are not carried out. He sometimes
interferes by means of arbitrary judgments and miracles,
distributed with a good deal of favouritism. He likes to be
truckled to and is always ready to pounce on anybody who
trips up over a difficulty in the Law, or is having a bit of
fun. He is rather like a Dictator, only larger and more
arbitrary.

_Q.:_ What does the Church think of God the Son?

_A.:_ He is in some way to be identified with Jesus of
Nazareth. It was not His fault that the world was made like
this, and, unlike God the Father, He is friendly to man and
did His best to reconcile man to God (see _Atonement_). He
has a good deal of influence with God, and if you want
anything done, it is best to apply to Him.

_Q.:_ What does the Church think of God the Holy Ghost?

_A.:_ I don't know exactly. He was never seen or heard of
till Whit-Sunday. There is a sin against Him which damns you
for ever, but nobody knows what it is.

_Q.:_ What is the doctrine of the Trinity?

_A.:_ "The Father incomprehensible, the Son
incomprehensible, and the whole thing incomprehensible."
Something put in by theologians to make it more
difficult--nothing to do with daily life or ethics.

_Q.:_ What was Jesus Christ like in real life?

_A.:_ He was a good man--so good as to be called the Son of
God. He is to be identified in some way with God the Son
(q.v.). He was meek and mild and preached a simple religion
of love and pacifism. He had no sense of humour. Anything in
the Bible that suggests another side to His character must
be an interpolation, or a paradox invented by G. K.
Chesterton. If we try to live like Him, God the Father will
let us off being damned hereafter and only have us tortured
in this life instead.

_Q.:_ What is meant by the Atonement?

_A.:_ God wanted to damn everybody, but His vindictive
sadism was sated by the crucifixion of His own Son, who was
quite innocent, and therefore a particularly attractive
victim. He now only damns people who don't follow Christ or
who never heard of Him.

_Q.:_ What does the Church think of sex?

_A.:_ God made it necessary to the machinery of the world,
and tolerates it, provided the parties (a) are married, and
(b) get no pleasure out of it.

_Q.:_ What does the Church call Sin?

_A.:_ Sex (otherwise than as excepted above); getting
drunk; saying "damn"; murder, and cruelty to dumb animals;
not going to church; most kinds of amusement. "Original sin"
means that anything we enjoy doing is wrong.

_Q.:_ What is faith?

_A.:_ Resolutely shutting your eyes to scientific fact.

_Q.:_ What is the human intellect?

_A.:_ A barrier to faith.

_Q.:_ What are the seven Christian virtues?

_A.:_ Respectability; childishness; mental timidity;
dulness; sentimentality; censoriousness; and depression of
spirits.

_Q.:_ Wilt thou be baptised in this faith?

_A.:_ No fear!

I cannot help feeling that as a statement of Christian
orthodoxy, these replies are inadequate, if not misleading.
But I also cannot help feeling that they do fairly
accurately represent what many people take Christian
orthodoxy to be, and for this state of affairs I am inclined
to blame the orthodox. Whenever an average Christian is
represented in a novel or a play, he is pretty sure to be
shown practising one or all of the Seven Deadly Virtues
enumerated above, and I am afraid that this is the
impression made by the average Christian upon the world at
large.

Perhaps we are not following Christ all the way or in quite
the right spirit. We are apt, for example, to be a little
sparing of the palms and the hosannas. We are chary of
wielding the scourge of small cords, lest we should offend
somebody or interfere with trade. We do not furbish up our
wits to disentangle knotty questions about Sunday observance
and tribute-money, nor hasten to sit at the feet of the
doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions. We
pass hastily over disquieting jests about making friends
with the mammon of unrighteousness and alarming observations
about bringing not peace but a sword; nor do we distinguish
ourselves by the graciousness with which we sit at meat with
publicans and sinners. Somehow or other, and with the best
intentions, we have shown the world the typical Christian in
the likeness of a crashing and rather ill-natured bore--and
this in the Name of One Who assuredly never bored a soul in
those thirty-three years during which He passed through the
world like a flame.

Let us, in Heaven's name, drag out the Divine Drama from
under the dreadful accumulation of slip-shod thinking and
trashy sentiment heaped upon it, and set it on an open stage
to startle the world into some sort of vigorous reaction. If
the pious are the first to be shocked, so much the worse for
the pious--others will pass into the Kingdom of Heaven
before them. If all men are offended because of Christ, let
them be offended; but where is the sense of their being
offended at something that is not Christ and is nothing like
Him? We do Him singularly little honour by watering down His
personality till it could not offend a fly. Surely it is not
the business of the Church to adapt Christ to men, but to
adapt men to Christ.

It is the dogma that is the drama--not beautiful phrases,
nor comforting sentiments, nor vague aspirations to
loving-kindness and uplift, nor the promise of something
nice after death--but the terrifying assertion that the same
God Who made the world lived in the world and passed through
the grave and gate of death. Show that to the heathen, and
they may not believe it; but at least they may realise that
here is something that a man might be glad to believe.




[End of _Strong Meat_ by Dorothy L. Sayers]