Half of the things that Dorothy Sayers said that I liked.

I was shelving books in the library Friday afternoon during finals week (when everyone returns the stacks of books they’ve hoarded for term papers right before they leave campus) and I saw a little book by Dorothy Sayers entitled, Are Women Human? I started it and finished it, and then I had to have more. A 20th-century British writer, Sayers develops an extended metaphor of the creator and His relation to creation in Mind of the Maker. I found so many valuable passages in it that I wanted to get them all in one place, and this is place I’m doing it in. Here are the sections I noted from the first half of the book:

“When there is a genuine conflict of opinion, it is necessary to go behind the moral code and appeal to the natural law—to prove, that is, at the bar of experience, that St. Francis does in fact enjoy a freer truth to essential human nature than Caligula, and that a society of Caligulas is more likely to end in catastrophe than a society of Franciscans” (p. 10). Natural law is embodied in the dictates of Christianity. These are not arbitrary, but in fact speak to the very essence of humanity, describing the ideal manner of living and prescribing what will be best for the individual and the world. Statements like “Whosoever will save his life shall lose it” seem nonsensical and random at first glance, but through experience with the paradoxes and impossibilities that arise in life, the truth of these sayings becomes evident. “The conditions of salvation . . . purport to be necessary conditions based on the facts of human nature” (p. 15). Said Lord David Cecil: “Christianity has compelled the mind of man not because it is the most cheering view of man’s existence but because it is truest to the facts” (p. 16).

A creed put forward by authority deserves respect in the measure that we respect the authority’s claim to be a judge of truth. If the creed and the authority alike are conceived as being arbitrary, capricious and irrational, we shall continue in a state of terror and bewilderment, since we shall never know from one minute to the next what we are supposed to be doing, or why, or what we have to expect. But a creed that can be shown to have its basis in fact inclines us to trust the judgment of the authority; if in this case and in that it turns out to be correct, we may be disposed to think that it is, on the whole, probable that it is correct about everything. The necessary condition for assessing the value of creeds is that we should fully understand that they claim to be, not idealistic fancies, not arbitrary codes, not abstractions irrelevant to human life and thought, but statements of fact about the universe as we know it (p. 17).

All language about God must, as St. Thomas Aquinas pointed out, necessarily be analogical. We need not be surprised at this, still less suppose that because it is analogical it is therefore valueless or without any relation to the truth. The fact is, that all language about everything is analogical; we think in a series of metaphors. . . . [M]an has made all existence in his own image (p. 23).

Though we cannot create matter, we continually, by rearrangement, create new and unique entities. A million buttons, stamped out by machine, though they may not be exactly alike, are not the same button; with each separate act of making, an entity has appeared in the world that was not there before. Nevertheless, we perceive that this is only a very poor and restricted kind of creation. We acknowledge a richer experience in the making of an individual and original work (p. 28).

Poets have, indeed, often communicated in their own mode of expression truths identical with the theologians’ truths; but just because of the difference in the modes of expression, we often fail to see the identity of the statements (p. 30).

We simply do not know of any creation which goes on creating itself in variety when the creator has withdrawn from it. . . . We will therefore stick to the analogy which we have chosen—that of the imaginative creator—and continue with it, keeping very clearly in view the limitation that it applies to the living artist, engaged in a creative act, of which we cannot yet see the finished results (p. 58-59).

Consequences cannot be separated from their causes without a loss of power; and we may ask ourselves how much power would be left in the story of the crucifixion, as a story, if Christ had come down from the cross. That would have been an irrelevant miracle, whereas the story of the resurrection is relevant, leaving the consequences of action and character still in logical connection with their causes. It is, in fact, an outstanding example of the development we have already considered—the leading of the story back, by the new and more powerful way of grace, to the issue demanded by the way of judgment, so that the law of nature is not destroyed but fulfilled (p. 83).

There is, of course, no reason why an infinite Mind should not reveal itself in an infinite number of forms, each being subject to the nature of that particular form (p. 90).

Only X can give reality to Not-X; that is to say, Not-Being depends for its reality upon Being. In this way we may faintly see how the creation of Time may be said automatically to create a time when Time was not, and how the Being of God can be said to create a Not-Being that is not God. The bung-hole is as real as the barrel, but its reality is contingent upon the reality of the barrel. . . . In this sense, therefore, God, Creator of all things, creates Evil as well as Good, because the creation of a category of Good necessarily creates a category of Not-Good. . . . The creative will, free and active like God, is able to will Not-Being into Being, and thus produce an Evil which is no longer negative but positive. This, according to the ancient myth of the Fall, is what happened to Men. They desired to be ‘as gods, knowing good and evil.’ God, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, knows evil ‘by simple intelligence’—that is, in the category of Not-Being. But men, not being pure intelligences, but created within a space-time framework, could not ‘know’ Evil as Not-Being—they could ‘know’ it only by experience; that is, by associating their wills with it and so calling it into active Being. Thus the Fall has been described as the ‘fall into self-consciousness,’ and also as the ‘fall into self-will’ (p. 101-103).

By materializing his poem—that is, by writing it down and publishing it—he subjects it to the impact of alien wills. These alien wills can, if they like, become actively aware of all the possible wrong words and call them into positive being. They can, for example, misquote, misinterpret, or deliberately alter the poem. This evil is contingent upon the poet’s original good: you cannot misquote a poem that is not there, and the poet is (in that sense) responsible for all subsequent misquotations of his work. But one can scarcely hold him guilty of them (p. 105).