Book Club: Chapter 7 - Maker of All Things/Maker of Ill Things

Dorothy Sayers discusses the problem of evil in this chapter, starting with the question, "Did God make the devil?" What are the origins and nature of evil?

She quickly concludes that this isn't the place to thoroughly examine the various theories concerning the nature of evil, but is looking for a literary analogy that might help us understand it.

For purposes of this analogy, she qualifies her use of the word 'evil' as 'bad art,' not immoral behavior. In more exacting terms, 'good' is equal to good craftsmanship, 'beauty' being artistic beauty, and 'truth' is structural truth.

Her analogy is this: the writer selects the exact right word (I would add, series of words) to convey his idea. By his creation of this 'good' thing, he has necessarily categorized all the other available words that he did not use, as 'wrong.' He didn't set out to create a list of wrong words, but by virtue of his selection of the right words, the others become wrong.

There was no way this writer could have created a good without also creating a corresponding evil. She gives an example of a man who tried to rewrite Hamlet for the purpose of improving upon it. The original writer of Hamlet, having used his idea, energy, and power is the "god" of this work. The imitator then, is grasping at equality with "god" and does all kinds of damage.

She goes on to say that we may redeem evil by a creative act. That is, to take an evil power and turn it into active good. By getting a good laugh at our imitator above, or by using his example to further make her point in this chapter, are two ways of redeeming his 'wrong' work.

All of this got me thinking about Christmas, as we are less than two weeks away from that beautiful holiday. One way in which I think Christmas has been terribly corrupted is by a series of ads I once heard/saw leading up to this holiday.

These ads were by a jewelry store and the main gist of the ad was directed to husbands and said, your wife will not be as happy with the piece of jewelry you are giving her if you don't buy it from our store. I found this ad to be particularly evil because it worked to convince a husband that his wife's thought life would most definitely yield to her base, evil nature, and be dissatisfied with his gift merely because it wasn't purchased at the right store. And if she was asked by a girlfriend to divulge where her gift came from, she would be ashamed to say Store X rather than Store Y.

This is evil in so many ways it's hard to know where to start. But rather than go through all that, I'm jumping ahead to Dorothy Sayers claim that we can redeem evil by a creative act. What kind of creative act might redeem this evil? Is it simply a matter of refusing to shop at that store or is there more to it? She does say that we mustn't pretend that it doesn't exist, as this is likened to pretending the Fall didn't happen.

This has me somewhat stumped at the moment.

Book Club: Chapter 6 - The Energy Incarnate in Self-Expression

Each of the chapters begin with a quote selected by Dorothy Sayers. When I read the T. S. Eliot quote preceding this chapter, I thought if this is any indication of what's coming, I'm sunk! The quote, from a work I'm unfamiliar with, made a small bit more sense after reading chapter 6.

Here in chapter 6, Sayers, draws an analogy between an author's autobiography and the doctrine that God "wrote His own autobiography" in His creation.

She begins again with the tribus: Idea, Power, and Energy. The Idea in our analogy represents the full personality of the writer. The Power, the power of that personality, and the Energy, the total self-awareness of his own personality, and as such, is aware of the Idea and manifests its Power into material form.

She supports her analogy with four points.

1st) That which it creates (the autobiography) is exactly like all his other works in that is suffers the same limitations. He is a character in a book being read by a person who doesn't and can't know the wholeness of the author, only what is being revealed in his written work. The author on the other hand, is aware of and conscious of his eternal wholeness, but cannot, even if he wished to, express all of that to his reader.

That sounds very much like our Creator God to me.

2nd) The autobiography, though a single element in his collection of works, is an interpretation of the whole collection. As we gain greater understanding of the author, it will reveal the relation of all his works to his Idea of himself.

By God's incarnation, He is saying, "See! This is what my eternal Idea looks like in terms of my creation."

3rd) As she explained in earlier chapters, though the autobiography *is* the author, it can never be the whole of an author. We can say it is a true revelation, nonetheless, it is only a partial revelation.

In the analogy terms, the work is equal to the Idea, as touching the author's essence, but inferior to the Idea as touching the author's expression.

In theological terms, the Word is said to be equal to the Father as touching His Godhead, and inferior to the Father as touching His manhood.

It's a perfect revelation, but only insofar as it goes.

4th and lastly) The truth about the writer's personality will be revealed, like it or not. The truth of what he states will be tested by the form in which it is stated. We should be unafraid of holding it to the severest tests of examinations. If a work is handled gingerly, it has the affect of revealing a fear that it won't hold up.

This certainly rings true to me. We have seen how the MSM, having chosen their winners, not only dismiss any examination, but readily cover for their chosen ones should someone else put them to a test.

With regard to Scripture, I think this is equally true. Those who are afraid to question the parts that seem implausible or difficult to understand are revealing their fear that it might not hold up under intense scrutiny. When in fact, nothing could be further from the truth. We have seen and continue to see how science supports the truth of the Word. (Not to be confused with faith, which is a necessary and vital part of inner belief. A person can believe much of the Scripture and even say, "It is true." but not be a child of God.) That is another discussion, but in terms of Sayers' analogy, I think it holds true.

There is the person whose faith says, "I don't need to put it to the severest of tests. I believe it because God said it." While laudable, this person may not be able to help the would-be Believer through his search and investigation, if he isn't willing to look at questions from other sides and answer them honestly and truthfully.

This all sounds rather perfunctory, and I don't mean it to. It reinforces to me the necessity to be in the Word constantly, studying it, and making it my life's primary focus.

Her final sentence was a good summary, "Nobody but a god can pass unscathed through the searching ordeal of incarnation."

Book Club: Chapter 5 - Free Will and the Miracle

I feel like Dorothy Sayers is getting into more familiar and accessible material in this chapter.  At least for me.  I do better with the concrete.  It will be a challenge for me to describe it well, though.

In this chapter she discusses how a character must be true to themselves, and when they are not, it creates a falsity.  The confident, trusting woman who, because of a miscommunication with the guy in her life, has a sudden turn to doubt and tormenting questioning isn't being true to her nature, character.  These are the makings for many a romance movie.

She talks about how an author has an idea he wants to develop, and as he works to develop the characters it comes to a place where the idea cannot unfold the way he wants it to without one or more of the characters being untrue to their nature.  If he proceeds, the unity of the story is upset and the reader will sense it.

There is another way to effect change in the story and that is by divine intervention.  I think this happens somewhat frequently in story lines, and as author, he can choose whatever kind of intervention is necessary to keep the plot moving forward, or satisfy the desires of a character.  Sayers says that, as writer, she is able to perform any miracle she likes (slay inconvenient characters, bring about accidents, etc.), but the question is, how desirable is it?  She believes it is artistically better to bring about 'poetic justice' in accordance with the person's character. We can more readily believe it and be satisfied with it.  "Nor let God intervene unless the difficulty be worthy of his attention."

I expected to see the phrase Deus ex machina in describing this, but she uses thaumaturge. I think they are synonymous in the way she uses it, and it makes me question whether we have moved away from Greek-based words/phrases to Latin naturally or by design, or at all.  There are far fewer students of Greek today than Latin, and far fewer of both than in her day.

I feel that I haven't grasped nor explained the depth of her point in this chapter.  Anxious to read what my fellow readers have to say.  They can be found through Ordo Amoris.

Book Club: Chapter 4 - Energy Revealed in Creation

I very much enjoyed this chapter.  (Perhaps because I didn't have to read it three times to really digest it!)  :-p

I enjoyed getting the insight into how an author of fiction must really get the mind of the character, sort of put on the character, like a set of clothing, when writing for him.  It made excellent sense to me and made me realize how much energy and thought goes into writing a piece of fiction.  I loved her phrase about an author's "favorite" characters as the "saints and prophets of his art."

Her explanation about how we really cannot pin down an author based on his writings made sense, although I've found myself crossing that line with authors like Steinbeck and Kingsolver.  She says, "The mind is not the sum of its works, though it includes them all."

Interestingly, a student (and dare I say, friend?) sent me an essay by C.S. Lewis to read before we meet for class this week.  Renee, you will know this student, Jamie, who is highly intellectual and loves to read and discuss what she reads.

This essay by Lewis is titled De Descriptione Temporum and is his inaugural lecture from The Chair of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Cambridge University in 1954.  The essay is about where to make divisions in history; where is the line between the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages; between the Middle Ages and the Modern Age?  He argues for a revision to the hitherto demarcations.  But, in the midst of this lecture he touches on something that Dorothy Sayers spoke about in the previous chapter.  It is his 4th supporting point on redrawing the lines.  I will quote him here:

"Lastly, I play my trump card.  Between Jane Austen and us, but not between her and Shakespeare, Chaucer, Alfred, Virgil, Homer, or the Pharaohs, comes the birth of the machines.  This lifts us at once into a region of change far above all that we have hitherto considered.  For this is a parallel to the great changes by which we divide epochs of pre-history.  This is on a level with the change from stone to bronze, or from a pastoral to an agricultural economy.  It alters Man's place in nature.  The theme has been celebrated till we are all sick of it, so I will here say nothing about its economic and social consequences, immeasurable though they are.  What concerns us more is its psychological effect.  How has it comes about that we use the highly emotive word "stagnation," with all its malodorous and malarial overtones for what other ages would have called "permanence?"  Why does the word "permanence" suggest to us clumsiness, inefficiency, barbarity?  When our ancestors talked of the primitive church or the primitive purity of our constitution they meant nothing of that sort. Why does "latest" in advertisements mean "best?"  Well, let us admit that these semantic developments owe something to the nineteenth-century belief in spontaneous progress which itself owes something either to Darwin's theorem of biological evolution or to that myth of universal evolutionism which is really so different from it, and earlier.  For the two great imaginative expressions of the myth, as distinct from the from the theorem-Keats's Hyperion and Wagner's Ring-are pre-Darwinian.  Let us give these their due.  But I submit that what has imposed this climate of opinion so firmly on the human mind is a new archetypal image.  It is the image of old machines being superseded by new and better ones.  For in the world of machines the new most often really is better and the primitive really is the clumsy.  And this image, potent in all our minds, reigns almost without rival in the minds of the uneducated.  For to them, after their marriage and the births of their children, the very milestones of life are technical advances.  From the old push-bike to the motor-bike and thence to the little car; from gramophone to radio and from radio to television; from the range to the stove; these are the very stages of their pilgrimage.  But whether from this cause or from some other, assuredly that approach to life which has left these footprints on our language is the thing that separates us most sharply from our ancestors and whose absence would strike us as most alien if we could return to their world.  Conversely, our assumption that everything is provisional and soon to be superseded, that the attainment of goods we have never yet had, rather than the defence and conservation of those we have already, is the cardinal business of life, would most shock and bewilder them if they could visit ours."

That's but a very small portion of his talk and I'll say just one more thing about it.  He believed we have lived to see the 2nd death of ancient learning.  And that we (as Believers) have much more in common with the ancients who worshiped other gods than with our contemporaries who worship none.

Hopefully you can see the parallel with Dorothy Sayers that I was getting at; that belief that just because some is new, doesn't necessarily mean it is better.  But we are conditioned to this.  I thought Lewis expanded on that fact very well.