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Natural Man Sees Shadows

If you think in terms of Paul on Mars Hill, man erects idols that are mere shadows of reality. These are monuments to an unknown god. They think by making an image they are making something concrete. They’re actually making something that has no true material existence. It’s a caricature, a parody, a shadow of something they don’t even know.

Now take this brief but loaded comment from Van Til on the state of humanity in sin:

From the point of view that man, as dead in trespasses and sins, seeks to interpret life in terms of himself instead of in terms of God, he is wholly mistaken. ‘From this ultimate point of view the “natural man” knows nothing truly. He has chains about his neck and sees shadows only’…

Scott Oliphant, the editor of Van Til’s book, comments:

Plato (through Socrates) describes people who are confined to a cave and who see shadows only. Eventually they begin to interpret the shadows as the true reality. The philosopher, on the other hand, is the one who escapes the shadows of the cave and thus ascribes true forms to reality. Similarly, the natural man sees shadows only and thinks that such shadows are the substance of true reality. He is never able to get to the basic truth of the matter.

The natural man sees shadows. Those shadows come through in natural man’s work. They come through in movies, novels, art, etc. They cast the shadows onto their canvases. They are common grace glimpses of truth that don’t put forth the actual substance of Christ. But those who have the Spirit see Christ even where natural man only puts forth and sees shadows.

For instance, you see a heroic act of self-sacrifice in a movie. It’s a shadow. And it’s all the natural man sees. Maybe it makes him emotional, but he still misses the substance – it all points to Christ as the ultimate self-sacrificer. That goes for stories of true love, of humility, and probably a good thousand other subjects. This is why Tim Keller has said that, for the Christian, every story is two stories and every song is two songs. It’s shadow and substance.

For more on this, see C.S. Lewis’ essay Transposition. I’ve written about that HERE.

-Quotes from Cornelius Van Til, Common Grace and the Gospel, p. 196

Creation as Story: A Narrative Wrench in Mechanistic Gears

The Whimsical Christian, by Dorothy Sayers, is an intriguing book to say the least. I have written about a couple of her books, The Mind of the Maker and Creed or Chaos?, in the past. My posts on The Mind of the Maker (HERE, HERE, and HERE) still rank among the most read on this blog.

Creed or Chaos? was a bit of a let down, but for good reason. The Mind of the Maker is hands-down one of the best books I have ever read. I read the book almost by sheer accident, having found it in a thrift store and knowing nothing about it other than the fact that I had come across the name of Dorothy Sayers in relation to C.S. Lewis.

The book was tough sledding. I felt as though I slogged through it. There were times when I just wanted to stop reading it, but I just never stopped. And the end result was life-changing. Sayers’ analogy of God and the creative mind of man is a game changer. I will not get into specifics at the moment, but I use things I learned from that book almost every week in one way or another.

There have been two game changers in The Whimsical Christian: the essays Toward a Christian Esthetic and Creative Mind. I will deal with both in due time, but for now I want to record one particular line of thought from Creative Mind.

In my defense of God as creator, I have often pointed out that the biblical record is that God created man and woman, along with the earliest plants and animals, along with every rock and grain of sand, in mature form. We do not know precisely what that ‘mature form’ looked like, but we know that the earliest apple tree did not spring from a seed; rather, it sprung, in maturity, wholly from the creative decree of God. If you looked at Adam, you might have said, ‘He’s probably 20 or 30 or 180 years old, who knows?’I do not have a strict opinion on the age of the universe, but I have sometimes joked that God may have just created the world the way he did to mess with our scientists. Again, that’s a joke. But Sayers actually gives winsome teeth to a similar idea – if the world is younger than it appears, it is simply a part of his craft as an artist:

It was scarcely possible to suppose any longer that God had created each species – to quote the test of Paradise Lost – ‘perfect forms, limb’d, and full grown,’ except on what seemed the extravagant assumption that, when creating the universe, he had at the same time provided it with evidence of a  purely imaginary past that had never had any actual existence. Now, the first thing to be said about this famous quarrel is that the churchmen need never have been perturbed at all about the method of creation, if they had remembered that the Book of Genesis was a book of poetical truth, and not intended as a scientific handbook of geology. They got into their difficulty, to a large extent, through having unwittingly slipped into accepting the scientist’s concept of the use of language, and supposing that a thing could not be true unless it was amenable to quantitative methods of proof. Eventually, and with many slips by the way, they contrived to clamber out of this false position; and today no reasonable theologian is at all perturbed by the idea  that created was effected by evolutionary methods. But, if the theologians had not lost touch with the nature of language; if they had not insensibly fallen into the eighteenth-century conception of the universe as a mechanism and God as the great engineer; if, instead they had chosen to think of God as a great, imaginative artist – then they might have offered a quite different kind of interpretation of the facts, with rather entertaining consequences. They might, in fact have seriously put forward the explanation I mentioned just now: that God had at some moment or other created the universe complete with all the vestiges of an imaginary past.

I have said that this seemed an extravagant assumption; so it does, if one thinks of God as a mechanician. But if one thinks of him as working in the same sort of way as a creative artist, then it no longer seems extravagant, but the most natural thing in the world. It is the way every novel in the world is written.

Every serious novelist starts with some or all of his characters ‘in perfect form and fully grown,’ complete with their pasts. Their present is conditioned by a past that exists, not fully on paper, but fully or partially in the creator’s imagination…

-Dorothy Sayers, Creative Mind, from The Whimsical Christian, pp. 106-107

The argument is simple: Every novel contains a story. Every story exists as a complete ‘creation’ within itself. Nothing outside of that creation can be said to truly exist within the story. Yet for every story there is a back story: it could be the exposition, or it could simply be things the author is presupposing in order to create the story. The bottom line is that the novel often begins with a fully mature character who appears in complete maturity. This maturity may include many warts and flaws, but those warts and flaws are purely a result of the imagination of the author and their cause may or may not be part of the narrative. They may exist purely in the mind of the author and therefore never enter into the actual ‘revelation’ or into the ‘creation’ itself.

Notice also that Sayers uses a ‘poetical’ reading of Genesis to actually argue against the scientists. When folks today attempt to postulate Genesis 1-3 as poetic, it is usually for the opposite reason. Interesting.

Sayers says that applying this type of thinking to our ideas about creation could be entertaining. Indeed.

She pins down most of our problems as ‘creationists’ to our assimilation of modern scientific categories. We, like so much secular Scientism, tend to view the creation as mechanistic. We have taken the watchmaker argument and reasoned that God actually made a watch. Instead, we should be more concerned with the fact that God has made an artistic story. We should consider the words of the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, whom she quotes: “God created the world by imagination.” He imagines and speaks; and things imagined become reality. “…Even God, who quickeneth the dead, and calleth those things which be not as though they were” (Rom. 4:17).

In this framework, of God as Creator in the sense of God as Artist, doctrines like predestination and divine providence are no longer abstract philosophical notions, but essential elements of his art. Of course an author predestines his characters; of course he causes circumstances to develop in a certain way in order to accomplish certain preordained ends. Of course he allows the drama of evil to enter the story, how else could there be a story? And of course he creates mature worlds with the appearance of age. That’s what artists do. He just gets to do it with real dirt, whereas we can only put ink on paper that comes from the real trees he has created.

Throw a narrative wrench into the mechanistic gears. The results could be entertaining.

Recent Reading: The Mind of the Maker, by Dorothy Sayers: Part 1 – Summary of the Argument for a Trinity in Creative Art

UPDATE: See my collection of quotes from this book HERE.

This book is one of the reasons why I haven’t been writing as much on my reading as usual. This book has been a thorn in my side for over a month (I don’t necessarily mean this in a bad way – it’s simply been a hard one to get through because of its depth).

In the posts to follow I’ll share some thought-provoking quotes, explore implications for our understanding of the doctrine of the Trinity, as well as implications for the issue of theodicy and a general view of life, and explore some of the problems of this metaphor. But in this post I simply want to summarize her argument for the implications of the Christian doctrine of God for creative artistry. I will spare opinion for later, and simply go about the business of summary and restatement.

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By way of summary, Sayers argues that the Christian doctrine of God, and specifically the Trinity, is the foundation for all creative work (even when not understood by the artist). In short form, creativity (she focuses mostly on writing, but by way of application all forms of creativity) in humans is a mark of the image of God in man. As she puts it:

In the metaphors used by the Christian creeds about the mind of the maker, the creative artist can recognize a true relation to his own experience… (p. 45).

As such, creativity, at its best, is rooted in trinity. This trinity takes the form of Idea, Energy, and Power – each reflecting the three persons of the Divine Trinity.

1. Idea (Reflecting the Father)
From the writer’s perspective, Idea reflects the Father. It is the ‘Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning’ (p. 37).

2. Energy (Reflecting the Son)
Second is the ‘Energy begotten of that idea, working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter’ (Ibid).

3. Power (Reflecting the Holy Spirit)
Third is the ‘Power, the meaning of the work and its response in the lively soul’ (pp. 38-39). The Power ‘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’ (pp. 37-38).

She adds,

And these three are one, each equally in itself the whole work, whereof none can exist without the other: and this is the image of the Trinity (p. 38).

We could summarize these three as Idea, Incarnation of Idea, and Application of Idea all sharing one essence. I find it helpful to relate them in that way.

It is the proper balance of this trinity, Sayers argues, that produces the best creative art. Yet most writers struggle to find balance. Either the strength of their work will rest in the Idea, while the Energy and Power lack. Or the Energy will abound while the Idea and Power lack, etc. At times they will excel in two areas, but the third will lack. She describes such writing as follows.

First, there is the Idea-driven, or ‘father-ridden,’ writer, who struggles with Energy and Power:

Writer after writer comes to grief through the delusion that what Chesterfield calls a ‘whiffling Activity’ will do the work of the Idea; that the Power of the Idea in his own mind will compensate for a disorderly Energy in manifestation; or that an Idea is a book in its own right, even when expressed without Energy and experienced without Power…It is the mark of the father-ridden [that is, Idea-writers] that they endeavor to impose the Idea directly upon the mind and senses, believing that this is the whole of the work…Father-ridden also is that very familiar and faintly comic figure of the man who ‘has the most marvellous idea for a book, if only he had time to sit down and write it’ (pp. 150-151).

In other words, the Idea-driven writer may struggle to give form to his idea, and/or to convey it in such a way as to make a connection with the reader or evoke any sympathy or emotion.

Second, there is the Energy-driven, or ‘son-ridden,’ writer, who struggles with Idea and Power:

Among the son-ridden, we may place such writers as Swinburne, in whom the immense ingenuity and sensuous loveliness of the manner is developed out of all proportion to the tenuity of the ruling idea (pp. 151-152).

The son-ridden writer then is all flesh. He can paint a picture beautifully, but you may be left wondering exactly what this picture portrays. There is no governing idea to hold it together.

Reliance on technique…is the besetting heresy of the son-ridden (p. 154).

Third, she considers the Power-driven, or ‘ghost-ridden’, or spirit-ridden, writer:

The ghost-ridden writer…conceives that the emotion which he feels is in itself sufficient to awaken response, without undergoing discipline of a thorough incarnation, and without the coherence that derives from reference to a controlling idea (p. 154).

This is writing geared toward arousing the emotions irrespective of the beauty of the idea and the form it takes.

Sayers then offers a helpful corrective so such ‘ghost-ridden’ writing:

Conquelin’s conclusion is ‘that in order to call forth emotion we ourselves must not feel it’; he does that say that we must never have felt it…What he is trying to tell us is that the artist must not attempt to force response by direct contact with any response of his own; for spirit cannot speak to spirit without intermediary. To interpret sensibility to sensibility we must have, not only controlled technique of the Energy ordering the material expression, but also the controlling Idea, ‘without parts or passions’ that, moving all things, ‘doth itself unmoved abide (p. 155).

In summary, then, she argues that the failure of the creative artist is generally caused by a lack of balance concerning these three areas. It is then, a failure in trinity – a failure to reflect the God of Scripture in our art.

Stay tuned.