Mystery Story

Mystery Story When Dorothy L. Sayers wrote a piece last week under the title "The Great Mystery," she had not returned to her old trade as a topnotch writer of mystery stories (Gaudy Night, Murder Must Advertise, Busman's Honeymoon). She was talking about the mystery of life after death, subject of a new London Sunday Times series (among future contributors: Bertrand Russell, the Aga Khan). Already noted as a translator of Dante and an able amateur theologian, Anglican Author Sayers gave a cogent and striking version of one Christian view of the afterlife.

Heaven. "We must first rid our minds of every concept of time and space as we know them," says Author Sayers. Time and space are created entities, part of the universe that was made by God the way an author writes a book containing its own time and space and people. The universe, like the world of the book, is only relatively real--true reality is the Maker. The souls of men are "capable of entering into the true Reality which we call 'Heaven' or 'the presence of God.' So that when we die, it is not as though the characters and actions of the book were 'continued in our next' like a serial; it is as though they came out from the book to partake of the real existence of their author."

Believers understood this well in the Middle Ages, says Author Sayers. The "childishly literal" conception of Heaven and Hell as places in space and extensions in time began "to creep out of popular mythology into the minds of educated people" after the Reformation and Renaissance. Heaven means meeting the Reality which is God, and for this, human souls need special training to free the will and judgment from error and perversion. If the training is not completed in life, it must be finished after death; "that is why any attempt to hold the spirits 'earthbound'--by 'calling them up' at seances, or even by importunate and possessive grief--is to do them wrong by delaying their entry into beatitude. But sooner or later, if beatitude is what we truly want, we shall get it; for it is what God wants for us."

Hell. The dreadful possibility remains, though, that one's wish for beatitude may be so weakened by self-indulgence that in the moment of death the soul may "shrink away from the presence of God." If this happens, "we shall have what we have willed to have. We shall have to live forever with the sinful self that we have chosen; and this is called Hell.

"God sends nobody to Hell; only a wicked ignorance can suggest that He would do to us the very thing He died to save us from. But He has so made us that what in the end we choose ... we shall have. If we enter the state called

Hell, it is because we have willed to do so ... So the Lady Julian said that in her visions she 'saw no Hell but sin' and St. Catherine of Genoa said that the fire of the torment was the light of God as experienced by those who reject it."

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