Book Club: Chapter 2, The Image of God

I found this chapter fascinating and full of revelation.  Dorothy Sayers states that man, made in the image of God, shares the characteristic of Creator.  Quoting St. Thomas Aquinas, she points out that all language about God is necessarily analogical; even the word creator, but it is none the worse for it.

She takes this thought further by saying "all language about everything is analogical; we think in a series of metaphors."  And especially so about things which we have no direct experience.  "Man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other yardstick."

We know we use metaphors and analogies and we instinctively know exactly where they begin and end.  (with the good)  Language is an expression of experience.

We are all makers in that we spend our lives putting matter together into new patterns.  The closest we come to being like our Creator (creating ex nihilo) is when we produce art.  An artistic work is more than the sum of its parts.  It is limitless and comes from the imagination.

For this reason, it is the artist we should look to for an unfurling of the truths surrounding God as Creator.  His experiences can shed light on this facet of Him.

I found the last part of the chapter good food for thought when Dorothy described the analytical bias of the previous three centuries saying it has encouraged us toward confining ourselves to a specific sphere of knowledge and, therefore, a special metaphor.  She states that she "sees signs that the human mind is beginning to move toward a synthesis of experience."

I'm trying to apply that belief to our age of technology, information, and immediacy.  Are we tending toward a synthesis of experience?  I really don't know.  Certainly more information is available to us.  What I see in terms of the secular world and its methods of communicating is language that is deliberately selected to evoke a particular meaning/image in its hearers/readers, when in fact another meaning is intended.  Intentional deception.

I think a lesson I might take from this chapter is the importance of truth in our metaphor.  Refining and molding it to be as near to the truth as we can make it.  One might say, Of course! Naturally!  But naturally we are lazy and tend toward the easy path.

I think I've perhaps gotten off on a rabbit trail, here.  But, then again, perhaps this is one of the many hidden discussions in this chapter that Cindy wrote about.