ABSTRACT
Dorothy L. Sayers acknowledges the value of the emotion that is created by a powerful representation of the facts of the story, but she worries that rather than taking the extra step and allowing themselves to be drawn to the truth of its theology, her listeners were simply wallowing in the emotion. Sayers, like John Henry Newman, valued reason and theology even in the midst of the imaginative vision that helps an individual move from the realities of facts to a deeper understanding of truth, and she emphasizes this in her representation of John. Sayers's statement of her reliance on intellect here reveals that she may be far closer in temperament to Judas than to John. At the end of her career, Sayers turned to Dante for inspiration rather than to the Victorians, but the impulse throughout all of her works was the same: to be the middlebrow translator who could make great ideas accessible to common readers.
