In an attack on the materialistic culture produced by capitalism, Dorothy Sayers wrote:

“It was left for the present age to endow Covetousness with glamour on a big scale, and to give it a title which it could carry like a flag. It occurred to somebody to call it Enterprise…. It has become a swaggering, swashbuckling,piratical sin… its war-cries are ‘Business Efficiency, ‘Free Competition’,’Get Out or Get Under!’ and ‘There’s always room at the Top!… it gambles and speculates; it thinks in a big way, it takes risks…”

[Creed or Chaos, 1947]

Prediction of the GFC?

Catherine Kenny observed that “the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers demonstrate the curious affinity between detection and a belief system which holds that there is something fundamentally amiss in human relations  [or as Sayers said in Creed or Chaos], ‘that there is a deep interior dislocation in the very centre of human personality'”

Catherine Kenney (2013).

“An extreme version of one of the basic tendencies in modern life, Judas’s total self-absorption represents the fearful consequences of making man the centre and measure of all things” [Catherine Kenney, The Remarkable Case of Dorothy L. Sayers, 2013, p. 239].

Look around for yourself. Isn’t self-absorption (often leading to outright narcissism) so marked, so representative, of the world around us?

My next essay will be on Dorothy Sayers.

Charles Raven, an eminent naturalist and leading Christian writer, said this:

“There has been…a general tendency in Christian thought to regard nature and the natural order, if not as inherently evil, at least as spiritually meaningless… The Catholic anchorite, for whom natural beauty was a snare of the devil, and his Puritan brother, for whom the world was at best a vale of tears. join hands here” [Creator Spirit, 1927].

“A great many of our difficulties in the past have arisen because we have thought in accordance with the habit of mind of science to the exclusion of that which is induced by art. Religion is something that binds art, as meaning the outward expression of what is spiritually and emotionally vital, with science, as the impulse to ascertain the truth. Both are there, and we must allow quite as much for all those apprehensions which come to us through the world of art as for those which come through the world of science”.

This interesting historical comment was made by William Temple, later Archbishop of Canterbury, in 1927.

What do you think?

“There is an hour of the Indian night, a little before the first glimmer of dawn, when the stars are unbelievably clear and close above, shining with a radiance beyond our belief in this foggy land. The trees stand silent around with a friendly presence… the whole world seems to be latent, alive, listening, eager. At such a moment the veil between the things that are seen and the things that are unseen becomes so thin as to interpose scarcely any barrier at all between the eternal beauty and truth and the soul which would comprehend them” [ J. S. Hoyland, 1928].

Einstein’s theory of relativity seemed to many to undermine ideas of absolutes, such as space and time. Did this undermine religion? The astrophysicist who popularised relativity to British audiences in the early 20th century, A. S. Eddington, didn’t think so. He argued that the laws of nature were essentially human constructs, in line with Einstein’s emphasis on the observer. Both religion and science depended upon human experience.

As Matthew Stanley puts it, Einstein helped destroy the model of a soulless mechanical universe. In 1925 Eddington said “the recent tendencies of scientific thought lead to the belief that mind is a greater instrument than was formerly recognized… In exploring his own territory the physicist comes up against the influence of that wider reality which he cannot altogether shut out”. Stanley summarises: “Our minds are creative instruments, sparks of the divine Logos that created the world as a whole. For Eddington, mind and consciousness were identical with spiritual values, and the recognition of the former was a recognition of the latter. In Quaker style, he suggested that the divine spark of human minds pointed to the presence of a greater Mind” [ Practical Mystic, 2007, p. 187].

British Quakers had long held pacifist views. They suffered terribly as conscientious objectors during WW1, many dying in solitary confinement in prison. As one wrote: “Things are coming near the end this morning. I was taken up to a quiet place and simply ‘pasted’ until I couldn’t stand and then they took me to hospital and forcibly fed me… The colonel was standing near me and thundered up and shouted ‘What! You won’t obey me?’ I quietly answered ‘ I must obey the commands of my God, Sir.’ ‘Damn your God!'”.