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.
_____________________________________________________________________
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.
