Author: Kevin Hargaden

Dorothy Sayers was a close friend of CS Lewis, she hung out often with Tolkein and she wrote bucketloads of best-selling detective novels. It reflects poorly on us that her writings on Christianity are so little read and rarely discussed. I have sought, in vain, for copies of her play The Man Born To Be King and while my college library has a copy of some essays from close to the time they were written, us chumps who weren’t around in the 1940’s have to make do with ugly reproductions of the original texts which are hard to read and in the case of my particular copy, missing most of page 39.

She was the first woman to be offered the prestigious Lambeth doctorate by the Archbishop of Canterbury (Temple) but she turned it down. The reason she gave was that she thought her potency as an advocate for the pale Galillean would be strengthened by not being seen as someone under a licence from ecclesial authority. One can only speculate that a woman so fiercely committed to orthodox and ecclesial practice was influenced to reject the honour because she had given birth to an “illegitimate child” and wanted to save the church from scandal should this horrendous fact ever be revealed.

Few tricks of Satan were as successful as convincing those who worship an “illegitimate child” that children should be the subject and topic of shame.

The Mind of the Maker exhibits all the same qualities I have enjoyed in everything else I can track down by Sayers. The prose is crisp and sharp and witty and argumentative. The logic is impeccable. The whole effect is refreshing. It helps that her emphases so closely match my own: dogma matters, work should be something from which we reap joy, the market economy is warping our moral vision.

So in The Mind of the Maker she more fully develops an argument that began in early essays. Humans are marked by having a mind capable of creativity. For Sayers, this is the definitive aspect of our being. And the argument in this book is that the nature of that creativity reflects the very nature of reality in that it is Trinitarian.

Therefore, we could propose that Sayers says because authors are, God exists.

Regardless of your stance on the whole Jesus-as-the-son-of-God question, you have to admit that a series of essays that claim that the creative process mimics the character and action of God is pretty audacious.

For Sayers, all creativity is trinitarian but she focuses on the writer because that is what she knows. In short, here is her argument:

The Bible says that God created reality.
The Bible goes on to reveal God as a trinity – one God in three distinct but inter-penetrating persons.
For Sayers, the Christian claim is thus that God the Father composed the idea of reality and redemption, God the Son is the means through which creation and redemption is actualised and God the Spirit is the power of God made available to the subjective experiences of those persons who exist within reality.

Can that be followed?

Sayers then turns her attention to human beings when they create. Firstly, they get an idea. The idea has to be fleshed out, to speak in a simultaneously idiomatic and precise fashion. And when the idea is worked out as a product, it is set free to exert its influence depending on how well it is constructed.

So Rembrandt has the idea of how to paint the return of the prodigal son. Then he has to actually exert the energy to make that real. Then that painting astonishes us as we sit slackjawed in front of it on our trip to St. Petersburg. Or, because she thinks this trinitarian pattern of creativity holds for all our creations, not just the great ones or the ones done by Christians, Dan Brown has the idea for a story, then he writes the story and then we throw the Da Vinci Code across the room in frustrated boredom.

Like every argument for the existence of God, this can come across as sterile theorizing. But while the Internet Atheist is likely the only person who’ll get very excited about it, the benefit of the argument is how it honours and investigates human creativity. This is a strangely compelling little book and the direction it compels the reader is to writing. I have never before realised how deeply satisfying the task of writing fiction might be for my spiritual life. But Sayers is able to give us a glimpse into her vocation as a teller of stories and it is tempting.

I’d love someone with more knowledge about these things to tell me how the following argument influenced or didn’t influence John Howard Yoder in his famous claim that the grain of the universe goes with those who carry crosses. For Sayers, the grain of the universe flows with the creative act. I don’t think that these are incompatible positions, but Yoder is more Biblically accurate and more anthropologically generous. Still, this is not the sort of thing you find in a contemporary apologetics text:

… Newton, being a rational man, concluded that the two kinds of behaviour [apples and planets] resembled one another – not because the planets had copied the apples, or the apples copied the planets, but – because both were examples of the working of one and the same principle. If you took a cross-section of the physical universe at the point marked “Solar System” and again at the point marked “Apple”, the same pattern was exhibited; and the natural and proper conclusion was that this pattern was part of a universal structure, which ran through the world of visible phenomena as the grain runs through wood. Similarly, we may take a cross-section of the spiritual universe at the point marked “Christian Theology” and at the point marked “Art”, and find at both precisely the same pattern of the creative mind; it is open to us to draw a similar conclusion.

But if we do – if we conclude that 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 pain, or music or letters. We shall have to ask ourselves whether the same patterns is not also exhibited in the spiritual structure of every man and woman.

– Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker, p. 148-149.

Your Correspondent, He gets drunk on words and hence is rarely perfectly sober

The conceit of The Age of Miracles is that it is a novel about the end of the world, like all the other novels about the end of the world that we are writing because as a culture we can’t imagine any hope big enough to keep the world going against the forces of inertia, entropy or some other invisible entity that inexorably exerts itself against us.

In the case of this novel, that force is time itself. Without giving too much away, this is a book about what happens when the globe itself becomes sluggish. But it isn’t. It is told on the micro-scale of a family of a doctor and a drama teacher and their 11 year old girl, who is our narrator.

Remember when you were 11? The world was still experienced as a confusing mess of many different things that presented themselves to you without any cohesive sense of how they should fit together. And when you were 11 you didn’t know what was about to happen at 12 or at 13. The whole of your short life is the entirety of world history to you and all of a sudden puberty is about to hit. Nothing will be the same. The things that allowed you to navigate through the social spaces you inhabit were about to shift under the strange unspoken power of desire. The certainties that marked out the one coherent territory of life, home, were about to be shaken by the granting of sight to see how complex adult relationships were. And the qualities of life that gave you comfort – your competencies and interests and your sense of time and place – were all about to be accelerated and slowed in random ways by the physical metamorphosis around the corner.

11 was still a pretty deadly time though.

And so this novel charts the slow disintegration of human life as a way to see inside the soul of a girl on that cusp.

Fiendishly clever, eh? But this is not a book that is up itself. It is easy to read and reminded me of those summer days (at about the age of 11) when I first discovered Z For Zachariah. It is tonally very different from that apocalyptic tale about a teenaged girl but it is in the same territory of readability. This child is going through dreadful things, but it isn’t burdensome to join her.

The refrain that lingers in Julia’s narration is: “It is amazing how little we knew”. The effect of lies and the incomplete assumed knowledge passed on to her by her authorities are the obstacles that get in her way, trouble her and I suppose connect her to the larger disaster unfolding all around. But for the most part, this novel resonates in how it articulates this stage of life so vividly through implicit analogy with the “slowing” and its effects.

The eucalyptus first arrived in California in the 1850s. Imported from Australia, the seeds crossed five thousand miles of open ocean before reaching the soil of our state. The trunks were supposed to be a miracle wood, perfect for a hundred different purposes, railroad ties especially. But the wood turned out to be useless. It curled as it dried and split when nailed. The state’s eucalyptus industry went bust before it ever boomed.

But the trees remained – and they spread. They were everywhere in my youth, and in my grandfather’s youth, too. Their slender silhouettes once swayed along the coastal canyons, the beach bluffs,the soccer fields. Their long leaves floated in the swimming pools and the gutters. They drifted along the banks of saltwater lagoons. For over one hundred and fifty years, the eucalyptus thrived in California, surviving every calamity: earthquake, drought, the invention of the automobile. But now the trees were suffering en masse. The leaves were losing their color. Orange sap oozed from openings in the trunks. Little by little, they were dying.

– Karen Thompson Walker, The Age of Miracles, p. 267-268.

Your Correspondent, Hears from the future that the past still exists

I might suggest that Aidan Mathews is either the most under-rated figure in Irish literature or I have horrendous taste in books. But if I put the matter that way it would be unfair to Mathews because the chances are that I have an underdeveloped literary palate and still Mathews deserves vastly more attention. English speaking pastors and theologians need to start paying heed to him aswell. In our love of Dostoyevsky and Flannery O’Connor and Marilynne Robinson, we have demonstrated ourselves to be able to appreciate wisdom even when it isn’t structured as a list of Papal decrees or systematic propositions. Let me urge you to track down some of Mathews’ poetry, plays, short stories or this, his novel. It will be worth it.

Muesli at Midnight is a discursive novel. It isn’t plot-driven. It features extensive internal reflection from the two main characters, two medical students falling in love and then extensive reflection based in their dialogue. It also features the skeleton of a late Archbishop of Dublin who accompanies them on a cycle around the island of Ireland raising funds for AIDS treatment.

This journey isn’t charted with the kind of geographic enthusiasm that I would have liked. As someone who has fallen in love with this island, I would want lots of descriptions of locale and locality. Instead, the journey that we go on is a sort of voyage through the human condition, never veering far from investigations of sex, faith and death. Ultimately, it is a book that features two annoying know-it-all undergrads, portrayed with such generosity of spirit that we can’t help but love their arrogant naivety. We also can’t help but be touched as they discover just how deep their love is for each other.

Here is Noel, a hearse-driver who gives Theo and Felicity a lift at one point, talking about how he keeps his bright teenaged daughter from reading the Bible without guidance since the worst thing that can happen to an intelligent young person is that they get hold of an idea and run with it:

‘I mean the Sermon on the Mount. If you took that to heart, you couldn’t go on living. Not the way we survive, anyhow. You’d have to commit a kind of suicide, and start all over. From the foundations. Which is fine, of course, except that you have to clear the site first, and the site happens to be your home, a house on a twenty-year mortgage.’

– Aidan Mathews, Muesli at Midnight, p. 237.

 
And that, my friends, is about as good a paragraph on how difficult an idea being born-again actually is for Irish people today as you can hope to find.

Your Correspondent, His personal motto is shrugging his shoulder

Oh woe is the way for the Christian committed to non-violence. Even your friends call you “grossly immoral”!

There is, of course, a small minority of people known as pacifists who reject violence altogether. Their courage and firmness of principle, often in the teeth of public revilement, are much to be admired. But pacifists are not just people who abhor violence. Almost everyone does that, with the exception of a thin sprinkling of sadists and psychopaths. For pacifism to be worth arguing with, it must be more than some pious declaration that war is disgusting. Cases with which almost everyone would agree are boring, however sound they may be. The only pacifist worth arguing with is one who rejects violence absolutely. And that means rejecting not just wars or revolutions, but refusing to tap an escaped murderer smartly over the skull, enough to stun but not kill him, when he is about to turn his machine gun on a classroom of small children. Anyone who was in a situation to do this and failed to do so would have a lot of explaining to do at the next meeting of the PTA. In any strict sense of the word, pacifism is grossly immoral.

Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right, p. 183-184.

In this short, witty, sprawling book, Eagleton takes on the ten major objections to why anyone should ever thing the last of the schoolmen, Karl Marx, still has relevance for the world we live in. If this is political apologetics, then Christian evangelists could learn alot from how broad the references are, how comfortable Eagleton is in moving between disciplines and fundamentally, how enjoyable the book is as a book.

Still and all Terry, there is a kind of pacifism that locates its source not in some purity of thought, but in the purity of action of a Jewish carpenter. That pacifism is fascinating without being grossly immoral but more to the point: it is in harmony with the very nature of created reality.

Your Correspondent, Always preferred C to C++ because he believes in a classless society

Douglas Coupland wrote a brilliant biography of Marshal McLuhan called “You Know Nothing Of My Work!” and I got to read it this week. On a Kindle! McLuhan would have hated that. Considering my last post was a hastily scribbled diatribe against Adam Gopnik’s power-play dressed up as defence of individualism, Coupland’s book is a rare thing – a piece of writing that takes the faith of its subject seriously.

Here is an example of how Coupland, whose own work is so heavily inspired by McLuhan, takes his distinctive voice to the job of praising this strange, angry, Catholic prophet:

But boy-oh-boy-boy did he string together words in a way that now seems like dense, fabulous poetry! And he saw the world as a book created by God, and believed that there is nothing in it that cannot be understood – and that we fail to try understanding it at our peril.

– Douglas Coupland, You Know Nothing Of My Work!, p. 17.

Your Correspondent, This is the best introduction to McLuhan.