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“First: the reality of Evil is contingent upon the reality of Good; and secondly: the Good, by merely occurring, automatically and inevitably creates its corresponding Evil. 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 Mind of the Maker: The Expression of Faith through Creativity and Art
― The Mind of the Maker: The Expression of Faith through Creativity and Art
“When the laws regulating human society are so formed as to come into collision with the nature of things, and in particular with the fundamental realities of human nature, they will end by producing an impossible situation which, unless the laws are altered, will issue in such catastrophes as war, pestilence and famine. Catastrophes thus caused are the execution of universal law upon arbitrary enactments which contravene the facts; they are thus properly called by theologians, judgments of God.”
― The Mind of the Maker
― The Mind of the Maker
“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.8 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.”
― The Mind of the Maker: The Expression of Faith through Creativity and Art
― The Mind of the Maker: The Expression of Faith through Creativity and Art
“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 specialised 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.”
― The Mind of the Maker: Dorothy L. Sayers' Witty Classic on the Trinity, Christianity, and Human Creativity
― The Mind of the Maker: Dorothy L. Sayers' Witty Classic on the Trinity, Christianity, and Human Creativity
“If all this is true, then it is to the creative artists that we should naturally turn for an exposition of what is meant by those credal formulae which deal with the nature of the Creative Mind. Actually, we seldom seem to consult them in the matter. 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. The artist does not recognise that the phrases of the creeds purport to be observations of fact about the creative mind as such, including his own; while the theologian, limiting the application of the phrases to the divine Maker, neglects to inquire of the artist what light he can throw upon them from his own immediate apprehension of truth.”
― The Mind of the Maker: Dorothy L. Sayers' Witty Classic on the Trinity, Christianity, and Human Creativity
― The Mind of the Maker: Dorothy L. Sayers' Witty Classic on the Trinity, Christianity, and Human Creativity
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