Dorothy L. Sayers on children

Talking-down is pretty well always fatal

Best known for her Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries and her translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, Dorothy L. Sayers was also a lay theologian of weight. Here she responds to two Anglican ministers who’d apparently suggested she enter a contest to write modern prayers that children would understand (she declined). The Quicunque Vult is an elaborate doctrinal statement usually called the Athanasian Creed, said in church on rare occasions. The letter is found in the second volume of The letters of Dorothy L. Sayers.

But it’s very unwise to dogmatise about children — how does one know what they make of anything? They don’t tell one. When I was a youngster, I might have asked the meaning of the phrase, “there is no health in us,” but what I should never have mentioned to any grown-up was the secret rapture with which I hailed the all-too-rare appearance in the programme of the Quicunque Vult.

I had a feeling that they would not approve of this fantastic preference, and I knew they would say, in their shy-making and unimaginative way, “Oh, but you can’t possibly understand that!” Of course I couldn’t understand it, but it was grand. So mysterious and full of rumbling great words, and it made such a wonderful woven pattern.

And it didn’t talk down to me, like those embarrassing hymns about being but little children weak. It was queer and exciting, like the beasts full of eyes, and the people casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea. . . .

You can’t generalise about children, except that talking-down is pretty well always fatal. And it’s probably true that if they learn the solid meaty stuff when they are young, they won’t have so much to blush for when they remember it later. I still enjoy the Quicunque, only now, instead of being magnificent and obscure it seems to be magnificent and lucid.

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