Argh. This is an old draft, but it published as if it were from today. Sorry.
I'm spending today taking chapter-by-chapter notes of this book. I decided to post them here in case they are helpful to anyone else. Since I'm looking for thesis material, these will be somewhat slanted toward that end. But if you need a general guide to what info is in each chapter, hopefully the page numbers listed will help you find what you need more quickly.
I'm using the Harper One edition. It says 1987, but the book doesn't look that old. I'll update this post after I get each chapter finished, changing the title a little until I'm done.
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Chapter 1. THE “LAWS” OF NATURE AND OPINION
There are at least two main sorts of laws:
a. “an arbitrary code of behavior based on a consensus of human opinion”
b. “a statement of unalterable fact about the nature of the universe”
“There is a universal moral law, as distinct from a moral code, which consists of certain statements of fact about the nature of man; and by behaving in conformity with which, man enjoys his true freedom. This is what the Christian church calls ‘the natural law.’ The more closely the moral code agrees with the natural law, the more it makes for freedom in human behavior; the more widely it departs from the natural law, the more it tends to enslave mankind and to produce the catastrophes called ‘judgments of God.’” (9)
“The universal moral law (or natural law of humanity) is discoverable, like any other law of nature, by experience. It cannot be promulgated, it can only be ascertained, because it is not a question of opinion but of fact.” (9-10)
Moral code v. moral law (10) (Moral code derives from the moral law, and it is dependent upon human consensus about what man’s nature is and ought to be.)
“Aristotle never offered his “unities” as an a priori personal opinion about the abstract ideal of a play: he offered them as observations of fact about the kind of plays which were, in practice, successful.” (15)
This relates to the creeds. People have argued that they are simply arbitrary opinions. However, this is not their claim. “They purport to be necessary conditions based on the facts of human nature.” (15)
Analogy. There could be a regulation that only allowed the making of omelettes while wearing a top hat. There could also be a law that omelettes can only be made through the breaking of eggs. “The Christian creeds are too frequently assumed to be in the top-hat category of egg-breaking.” … “The proper question to be asked about any creed is not, ‘Is it pleasant?’ but ‘is it true?’”
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Chapter 2: THE IMAGE OF GOD
Sayers discusses what it means to be made in God’s image. She states that “only the most-simpleminded” would assume this wording means we are made to resemble God physically, and that artwork portraying Him as an elderly gentleman in robes is necessarily symbolic. (21)
The “image” in which we are created includes masculinity and femininity, and has little connection with, “the aggressive masculinity of the pictorial Jehovah” because it “represents power, rationality” etc. She says, “Christian doctrine and tradition, indeed, by language and picture, sets its face against all sexual symbolism for the divine fertility. Its Trinity is wholly masculine, as all language relating to Man as a species is masculine.”
She talks about how the Jews were aware of the dangers and limitations of capturing God with art, so they forbade it. However, “human nature and the nature of human language defeated them.” She argues that we are naturally inclined to visualize God, so it is impossible to not imagine His appearance. “To forbid the making of pictures about God would be to forbid thinking about God at all, for man is so made that he has no way to think except in pictures.” (21-22)
She ponders what the author of Genesis meant when he wrote that mankind was made in God’s image. Was there something particular intended? When we go back into the text of Genesis to see what has been said of God at this point, “we find only the single assertion, ‘God created.’” So apparently, “The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.” (22)
ON THE LIMITATIONS OF METAPHOR:
This is a metaphor, she states, quoting Aquinas:
**Those things which are said of God and other things are predicated neither univocally nor equivocally, but analogically… .
**Accordingly, since we arrive at the knowledge of God from other things, the reality of the names predicated of God and other things is first in God according to His mode, but the meaning of the name is in Him afterwards. Wherefore He is said to be named from His effects. – ST. THOMAS AQUINAS: Summa contra Gentiles. (19)
However, there is a value in the analogy: “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. We can explain nothing in terms of itself, but only in terms of other things.” (23)
What dangers are there in interpreting God through analogy?
“It may be perilous, as it must be inadequate, to interpret God by analogy with ourselves, but we are compelled to do so; we have no other means of interpreting anything.” … “If the tendency to anthropomorphism is a good reason for refusing to think about God, it is an equally good reason for refusing to think about light, or oysters, or battleships.” (23)
She goes on to state that no matter what we encounter, we are looking through the lens of our humanity. Physicists use analogy in understanding the atom as both “wave” and “particle,” though they cannot be wholly true. Still, there is a value in the analogy. “… so long as he remembers that language and observation are human functions, partaking at every point of the limitations of humanity, he can get along quite well with them and carry out fruitful researches. To complain that man measures God by his own experience is a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick.” (24)
When we use various metaphors (King, Father, etc.) to describe God: “…we know perfectly well that they are metaphors and analogies; what more we know perfectly well where the metaphor begins and ends.” (25)
HOW THIS APPLIES TO ‘CREATE’:
“We use the word ‘create’ to convey an extension and amplification of something that we do know, and we limit the application of the metaphor precisely as we limit the application of the metaphor of fatherhood.” (27)
Each person is a maker. (28) “Though we cannot create matter, we continually, by rearrangement, create new and unique entities.”
“It is the artist who, more than other men, is able to create something out of nothing. A whole artistic work is immeasurably more than the sum of its parts.” (28)
Sayers posits that art also exists in a realm apart from its physical form. Then she talks about how art transcends a key law of the physical universe:
“Without the thought, though the material parts already exist, the form does not and cannot. The ‘creation’ is not a product of the matter. The amount of matter in the universe is limited, and its possible rearrangements, though the sum of them would amount to astronomical figures, is also limited. But no such limitation of numbers applies to the creation of works of art. The poet is not obliged, as it were, to destroy the material of a Hamlet in order to create a Falstaff, as a carpenter must destroy a tree-form to create a table-form. The components of the material world are fixed; those of the world of imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction or rearrangement of what went before.” (29)
She writes about the resonance of the poetic world with the theological, and how that is often missed:
“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.” (30)
She writes about how the negative (myopic) aspects of our culture’s analytic bias:
“Our minds are not infinite; and as the volume of the world’s knowledge increases, we tend more and more to confine ourselves, each to his special sphere of interest and to the specialized metaphor belonging to it. The analytic bias of the last three centuries has immensely encouraged this tendency, and it is now very difficult for the artist to speak the language of the theologian or the scientist the language of either. But the attempt must be made; and there are signs everywhere that the human mind is once more beginning to move towards a synthesis of experience.” (30-31)
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Chapter 3. IDEA, ENERGY, POWER
Sayers addresses the common assumption that the Trinity is inconceivable because of its mysterious nature. She believes there is some truth to this; however many difficult theological concepts have at least some corollary with human experience. (35)
She mentions Augustine of Hippo’s argument that a Trinitarian structure exists in the, “trinity of sight, for example: the form seen, the act of vision, and the mental attention which correlates the two. These three, though separable in theory, are inseparably present whenever you use your sight. Again, every thought is an inseparable trinity of memory, understanding, and will.” (36)
She believes the Trinitarian structure of activity is perhaps mysterious because it permeates everything. (Like the four dimensions. We cannot imagine the space-time world outside of them.) She does believe the artist might be able to remove himself just enough from the creative process to at least to examine its structure. (36)
She quotes her play The Zeal of Thy House to begin an exploration of Idea, Energy, and Power:
**For every work [or act] of creation is threefold, an earthly trinity to match the heavenly.
**First, [not in time, but merely in order of enumeration] there is the Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning: and this is the image of the Father.
**Second, there is the Creative Energy [or Activity] begotten of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter: and this is the image of the Word.
**Third, there is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul: and this is the image of the indwelling Spirit.
**And these three are one, each equally in itself the whole work, whereof none can exist without other: and this is the image of the Trinity. (39)
SOME CLARIFICATIONS ON “IDEA”:
1. The idea isn’t conscious:
The “formulation of the Idea in the writer’s mind is not the Idea itself, but its self-awareness in the Energy. Everything that is conscious, everything that has to do with form and time, and everything that has to do with process, belongs to the work of the Energy or Activity or “Word.” (38)
2. The idea doesn’t precede Energy in time:
“Energy creates the time-process” (38) (Similar to John’s concept that the Word was with God in the beginning.)
3. We know the that Energy is separate from the Idea because the Energy is constantly referring back to the Idea:
Theologically: the Son does the will of the Father
Artistically: The writer knows when a word is wrong because it doesn’t fit the Idea. The painter knows when a stroke is wrong because it doesn’t fit the Idea. (39)
4. Even though it takes time and space for the writer to work out a book, he knows it as a whole: “‘the end in the beginning.’” [I]t cannot be known as a thing-in-itself except as the Energy reveals it.”
SOME CLARIFICATIONS ON “ENERGY”
1. It is the Energy that is the creator in the sense in which the common man understands the word, because it brings about an expression in temporal form of the eternal and immutable Idea.”
2. The Idea cannot be understood without the Energy.
SOME CLARIFICATIONS ON “POWER”
1. It flows from the Idea and the Energy together. (40)
2. “It is the thing which flows back to the writer from his own activity and makes him, as it were, the reader of his own book.” (40-41)
3. “It is also, of course, the means by which the Activity is communicated to other readers and which produced a corresponding response in them. In fact from the reader’s point of view, it is the book.” (41)
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>>The unity of the creative Trinity:
Asking a writer to separate Idea, Energy, and Power leaves him confused. They are one in his mind. “Each of them is the complete book separately; yet in the complete book all of them exist together. He can, by an act of the intellect, ‘distinguish the persons’ but he cannot by any means ‘divide the substance.’ How could he? He cannot know the Idea, except by the Power interpreting his own Activity to him; he knows the Activity only as it reveals the Idea in Power; he knows the Power only as the revelation of the Idea in the Activity. All he can say is that these three are equally and eternally present in his own act of creation, and at every moment of it, whether or not the act ever becomes manifest in the form of a written and printed book.” (41)
>>The existence of the creative Trinity even when it remains within the sphere of imagination, because it works in response to itself:
“The creative act, that is, does not depend for its fulfillment upon its manifestation in a material creation.” (42)
>>The poet’s interaction with audience and with himself:
“To write the poem (or, of course, to give it material form in speech or song), is an act of love towards the poet’s own imaginative act and towards his fellow-beings. It is a social act; but the poet is, first and foremost, his own society, and would be none the less a poet if the means of material expression were refused by him or denied him.” (42)
Scientists often face difficulty because they fail to realize the analogical nature of language:
Men of science spend much time and effort in the attempt to disentangle words from their metaphorical and traditional associations; the attempt is bound to prove vain since it runs counter to the law of humanity.” (43)
Art is not like an invention, in which a later model replaces an earlier one. The appearance of Hamlet does not supersede Agamemnon. “Genius is, in fact, not subject to the ‘law’ of progress, and it is beginning to be extremely doubtful whether progress is a ‘law’ at all.” (44-45)
This means good old metaphors are still virile. “Metaphors become dead only when the metaphor is substituted for the experience, and the argument carried on in a sphere of abstraction without being at every point related to life.” (44)
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Chapter 4. THE ENERGY REVEALED IN CREATION
“…[i]t is possible for a reader, by reading a book, to discover something about the mind of the writer.” (49)
The creator is neither “the sum of all his works” nor “entirely detached from the work he has made and so unknowable in himself with the work provides us with no clue to his personality.” (49)
“We are continually tempted to confine the mind of the writer to its expression within his creation, particularly if it suits our purpose to do so. We try to identify him with this or that part of his works, as though it contained his whole mind.” (50)
However, it is correct that a “writer cannot create a character or express a thought or emotion which is not within his own mind.” (51)
Sayers discusses how this plays out within the creative process. Example of jealousy taken to the extreme. What would that be like? (51)
Chesterton quote explaining how he wrote Father Brown stories:
** “’I mean that I really did see myself, and my real self, committing the murders… I mean that I thought and thought about how a man might come to be like that, until I realised tat I really was like that, in everything except actual final consent to the action.’” (52)
However, a good writer must not become a character too much: “For if a character becomes merely a mouthpiece of the author, he ceases to be a character, and is no longer a living creation.” (53)
Good art demands diversity: “The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity, the more massive the unity. Incidentally, this is the weakness of most ‘edifying’ or ‘propaganda’ literature. There is no diversity. The Energy is active only in one part of the whole, and in consequence the wholeness is destroyed and the Power diminished.” (53) She talks about giving the devil his “due” as well as God. Then states … “a creative work in which all the characters automatically reproduce a single aspect of the writer’s mind is a work lacking in creative power.”
“The writer, then, if – under the conditions we know- he is to perform an act of power in creation, must allow his Energy to enter with an equal fullness into all his creatures, whatever portions of his personality they emphasize and embody.” (53)
A failure in this area is obvious in theater, because it is visibly awkward for a singularly-developed character to flail around a bunch of underdeveloped boobs. (54) The good playwright shifts energy from character to character while writing. (54)
“The mind is not the sum of all its works, though it includes them all. Though it produced the works one after the other, we cannot say that it is each of these works in turn. Before it made them, it included them all, potentially, and having finished them, it still includes them. It is both immanent in them and transcendent.” (56)
However, in a sense, the artwork exists independently of its author. We can interact with the art without interacting with the maker. We can “know the Iliad without knowing Homer.” (56)
Asking an author, “’What did you mean by this book?’ is to invite bafflement: the book itself is what the writer means.” (57)
We can look at a human artist’s works as “complete” at the end of his life. However, God’s works are different. He is Creator past, present, and future. She defies the idea that God just finished creating and stepped back to let things roll on their own, because it doesn’t correlate with human experience in creativity. Creativity builds upon what exists instead of destroys and remakes. (59)
“We are thus considering the temporal universe as one of those great serial works of which installments appear from time to time, all related to a central idea whose completeness is not yet manifest to the reader.” … “By our response to it, we are brought within the mind of the author and are caught up into the stream of his Power, which proceeds form his Energy, revealing his Idea to us and to himself.” (59)
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