Dorothy Sayers, the other half.

One of the most gratifying aspects of reading is encountering someone else who has thought about the same things you have, just more thoroughly, clearly, and articulately. The remarkable thing about Mind of the Maker was how often Dorothy Sayers expands and improves on concepts that have floated half-formed in my own head (like this one). Over and over again, Sayers pinned down and packaged ideas that I had barely glimpsed in my mental miasma.

Sayers mocks David Garrick for his attempted revision of Hamlet, illustrating the relationship between good and evil in light of the Fall. “We can redeem it. That is to say, it is possible to take its evil Power and turn it into active good. We can, for example, enjoy a good laugh at David Garrick. In so doing we, as it were, absorb the Evil in the anti-Hamlet and transmute it into an entirely new form of Good. This is a creative act, and it is the only kind of act that will actually turn positive Evil into positive Good. Or, we can use the dreadful example of David Garrick for edification, which is what I have tried to do here, in the hope that this will prove to be a good, creative activity.

"We can do this, only if we first get back into contact with the original great Idea that was in Hamlet—since we can never see how wrong Garrick was till we realize just how right Shakespeare was. In such ways, we can (while still thinking it a pity that David Garrick ever set pen to paper) enrich the world with more and more varied Goodness than would have been possible without the evil interference of David Garrick. What we must not do is to pretend that there never was a Garrick, or that his activities were not Evil. We must not, that is, try to behave as though the Fall had never occurred nor yet say that the Fall was a Good Thing in itself. But we may redeem the Fall by a creative act.

"That, according to the Christian doctrine, is the way that God behaved, and the only way in which we can behave if we want to be ‘as gods.’ The Fall had taken place and Evil had been called into active existence; the only way to transmute Evil into Good was to redeem it by creation. But, the Evil having been experienced, it could be redeemed only within the medium of experience—that is, by an incarnation in which experience was fully and freely in accordance with the Idea” (p. 107).

Evaluating a work as a whole is essential to understanding its full intent and import; how much more so this should be true for creation as a whole. Perhaps so many of the things that don't make sense now will align in light of eternity; the last chapter of the book will reveal the intent of all the ones that preceded it. “While watching the new play we are in contact with the Energy, which we experience as a sequence in time; we wonder ‘how it is going to work out.’ If, during the interval, we are asked what we think of it, we can give only a very incomplete answer. Everything depends, we feel, on the last act. But when the final curtain has come down, we feel quite differently towards the play—we can think of it as a whole, and see how all the episodes are related to one another to produce something inside our mind which is more than the sum-total of the emotions we experienced while sitting in the audience. It is in this timeless and complete form that it remains in our recollection; the Energy is now related to the Idea more or less as it was in the mind of the playwright: the Word has returned to the Father” (p. 116).

The real genius of Sayers' book is the extended metaphor that superimposes the trinity upon the creative process. She reckons the Father as the Idea that precedes the creation of a work, the Son as the Power that implements the work, and the Spirit as the Energy that reveals and communicates the work. So the trinity is manifested in the artist, and it is reflected in the creation as well. "This threefoldness in the reader's mind corresponds to the threefoldness of the work (Book-as-Thought, Book-as-Written, Book-as-Read) . . . The implication is that we find the threefold structure in ourselves (who are the-Book-as-Read) because that is the actual structure of the universe (which is the Book-as-Written), and that it is in the universe because it is in God's Idea about the universe (the Book-as-Thought). Further, that this structure is in God's Idea because it is the structure of God's mind. . . . There is nothing mythological about Christian Trinitarian doctrine: it is analogical. . . . This is the Trinity in the mind—the essential identity of Idea, Energy and Power, which is reflected as a Trinity in the work—the Book being the same book, whether thought, written or read" (p. 122-124).

Sayers takes on the concept of originality and makes a superb scriptural connection (it reminded me, incidentally, of this excellent article in Harper's last year). “The demand for ‘originality’—with the implication that the reminiscence of other writers is a sin against originality and a defect in the work—is a recent one and would have seemed quite ludicrous to poets of the Augustan Age, or of Shakespeare’s time. The traditional view is that each new work should be a fresh focus of power through which former streams of beauty, emotion, and reflection are directed. . . . The Power—the Spirit—is thus a social power, working to bring all minds into its own unity, sometimes by similarity and at other times by contrast. There is a diversity of gifts, but the same spirit” (p. 121).

Sayers accesses Acts 17:28 and examines its pertinence to her metaphor. “[I]t depends utterly upon the sustained and perpetually renewed will to creation of its maker. The work can live and grow on the sole condition of the maker’s untiring energy; to satisfy its will to die, he has only to stop working. In him it lives and moves and has its being, and it may say to him with literal truth, ‘Thou art my life, if thou withdraw, I die.’ . . . All [the human creator’s] efforts and desires reach out to that ideal creative archetype in whose unapproachable image he feels himself to be made, which can make a universe filled with free, conscious and co-operative wills; a part of his own personality and yet existing independently within the mind of the maker” (p. 141-142). This is why, I think, God had to become a character in His own book.

If her metaphor adheres, it means that we are, in many cases, denying an essential element of who we are as created creators. “[I]f we conclude that the creative mind is in fact the very grain of the spiritual universe—we cannot arbitrarily stop our investigations with the man who happens to work in stone, or paint, or music, or letters. We shall have to ask ourselves whether the same pattern is not also exhibited in the spiritual structure of every man and woman. And, if it is, whether, by confining the average man and woman to uncreative activities and an uncreative outlook, we are not doing violence to the very structure of our being” (p. 185).

“If the common man asks the artist for help in producing moral judgments or practical solutions, the only answer he can get is something like this: You must learn to handle practical situations as I handle the material of my book: you must take them and use them to make a new thing. . . . The distinction between the artist and the man who is not an artist thus lies in the fact that the artist is living in the ‘way of grace,’ so far as his vocation is concerned. He is not necessarily an artist in handling his personal life, but (since life is the material of his work) he has at least got thus far, that he is using life to make something new. Because of this, the pains and sorrows of this troublesome world can never, for him, be wholly meaningless and useless, as they are to the man who dumbly endures them and can (as he complains with only too much truth) ‘make nothing of them.’ If, therefore, we are to deal with our ‘problems’ in ‘a creative way,’ we must deal with them along the artist’s lines: not expecting to ‘solve’ them by a detective trick, but to ‘make something of them,’ even when they are, strictly speaking, insoluble” (p. 192-193).

When we covered Thoreau in American Writers las semester, my professor said that there are only four material pursuits: food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. Once we have achieved these, all we are doing is getting more of them. So the question that Thoreau asks, and asks us to ask ourselves, is whether we should keep striving for these, or maybe look for things that are more important. Sayers also derides two of my favorite objects of derision: movies and sports. “[W]e may begin to suspect that the ‘problem of Unemployment’ is not soluble in the terms in which it is set; and that what we ought to be asking is a totally different set of questions about Work and Money. Why, for example, does the actor so eagerly live to work, while the factory-worker, though often far better paid, reluctantly works to live? How much money would men need, beyond the subsistence that enables them to continue working, if the world (that is, you and I) admired work more than wealth? Does the fact that he is employed fully compensate a man for the fact that his work is trivial, unnecessary, or positively harmful to society: the manufacture of imbecile and ugly ornaments, for instance, or the deliberate throat-cutting between rival manufacturers of the same commodity? Ought we, in fact, to consider whether work is worth doing, before we encourage it for the sake of employment? In deciding whether man should be employed at a high wage in the production of debased and debasing cinema films or at a lower wage in the building of roads and houses, ought we to think at all about the comparative worth and necessity of bad films and good houses? Has the fact that enthusiastic crowds cheer and scream around professional footballers, while offering no enthusiastic greetings to longshoremen, anything to do with the wages offered to footballers and longshoremen respectively?” (p. 204).

“The hand of the creative artist, laid upon the major premise, rocks the foundations of the world; and he himself can indulge in this perilous occupation only because his mansion is not in the world but in the eternal heavens” (p. 212).