I have been rereading Dorothy Sayers’ translation of Dante, which is astonishingly good in a style of virtuosity that could not now be more old-fashioned. Her efforts to reproduce the rhyme scheme of the original, as well as much of the language, lead her often into archaism, but it is educated archaism: she uses old words in ways that they used to be used, and expects her readers to know, or to learn, what she does. Dante’s moral universe has a beauty and a quality of ineluctability — the torments are all in some sense self-chosen, and truthful as well as just; she brings this out.
Sawyers was writing in the late 1930s, in the middle of the last great efflorescence of British Christian thought. When you think of the number of first-rate Anglicans then, it’s astonishing: Sawyers herself (and read that translation before you dismiss her as a writer of detective stories); TS Eliot, Auden, CS Lewis, and even, in his odd way, Tolkein.
Who came by to replace them? Among poets, there are no first rate Christians. Rowan Williams is not bad, but neither is Wendy Cope. Among philosophers I suppose there’s Alasdair MacIntyre, but he was only briefly an Anglican, on his journey, through Marxism, from Ulster Presbyterianism to Roman Catholicism. Among prose writers, Penelope Fitzgerald. But it’s the decline in the standard of apologetics that really gets to me. Lewis, brutal, bitter and unfair as he was — and he is someone I read when I want my objections to Christianity reinforced — none the less was in many respects a fine psychologist, and a man with an eye for the beauty of the system he was defending.
Compare this with the frothy nonsense spouted by someone like Tom Wright about the enlightenment and “the privatisation of religion”, a favourite evangelical trope. He blames the horrors of the 20th century on the “late enlightenment”, as if what came before the enlightenment with its subversive ideas of religious tolerance and liberalism had ben very much better.
This style reaches a perfect pitch of absurdity in today’s Tablet, where Paul Vallely, who recently interviewed Wright, explains that Enlightenment thinkers “such as Kant, Rousseau, Voltaire and Leibniz” were greatly shocked by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Of course, any Christian is free to believe that Leibniz (d. 1715) was greatly shocked by the Lisbon earthquake but they will have a hard time producing evidence of this from his writings. In fact, Leibniz’s role in all this was to provide the inspiration for Dr Pangloss, who does get caught up in the Lisbon earthquake if I remenber Candide rightly. Yet the people who spout this ignorant and ahistorical nonsense sincerely believe that they are defending tradition against the atheist barbarians.