"The only sin passion can commit is to be joyless"
About this Quote
The claim that the only sin passion can commit is to be joyless overturns both prudish suspicion of desire and cynical reduction of love to appetite. Dorothy L. Sayers, a novelist and Christian thinker, argued throughout her work that created life is good and that desire, rightly ordered, is a form of praise. The problem is not intensity but falsity. When passion is joyless, something essential has gone wrong: the energy of love has been drained into coercion, vanity, boredom, or calculation. Joy functions as a moral barometer. It signals freedom, gratitude, play, and the recognition of the other as a person rather than an instrument.
Set against the hangover of Victorian morality and the disenchanted modernism of the interwar years, the line stands for a robust Christian humanism. Sayers refuses both the puritan distrust of pleasure and the commodified hedonism that treats desire as consumption. Joy marks the difference. Passion that is joyful bears the qualities she prized in art and work: integrity, generosity, and delight in reality for its own sake. Passion that is joyless is mechanical duty masquerading as virtue, or exploitation dressed up as romance. It betrays truth by making intimacy a transaction or a performance.
The principle also echoes her reflections on creativity. In The Mind of the Maker, Sayers contends that making is an imitation of divine creativity and therefore should be joyous. A work produced without joy is spiritually suspect because it treats creation as mere utility. So with love. Joy is not giddiness or license; it is the clear, hospitable gladness that arises when desire aligns with truth and charity. It demands courage and honesty, because counterfeit passion cannot sustain delight. By setting joy as the standard, Sayers simultaneously defends passion and disciplines it, affirming the body and safeguarding persons from being used.
Set against the hangover of Victorian morality and the disenchanted modernism of the interwar years, the line stands for a robust Christian humanism. Sayers refuses both the puritan distrust of pleasure and the commodified hedonism that treats desire as consumption. Joy marks the difference. Passion that is joyful bears the qualities she prized in art and work: integrity, generosity, and delight in reality for its own sake. Passion that is joyless is mechanical duty masquerading as virtue, or exploitation dressed up as romance. It betrays truth by making intimacy a transaction or a performance.
The principle also echoes her reflections on creativity. In The Mind of the Maker, Sayers contends that making is an imitation of divine creativity and therefore should be joyous. A work produced without joy is spiritually suspect because it treats creation as mere utility. So with love. Joy is not giddiness or license; it is the clear, hospitable gladness that arises when desire aligns with truth and charity. It demands courage and honesty, because counterfeit passion cannot sustain delight. By setting joy as the standard, Sayers simultaneously defends passion and disciplines it, affirming the body and safeguarding persons from being used.
Quote Details
| Topic | Joy |
|---|
More Quotes by Dorothy
Add to List
