Our Triune Creations
Christians who work within the arts frequently wrestle with an underlying tension: what does it even mean for us to be Christian artists? We may find ourselves caught between a Scylla and Chaybdis of two extremes. On the one hand, we’re afraid our art may get too evangelistic, too “preachy.” Yet we also don’t want to produce art as the world does: shouldn’t our work be distinguishable from that which a non-Christian generates?
This tension may never be fully resolvable in our own lifetimes, and different artists will no doubt address it in different ways. But one valuable move may be to take a step back and look at what our role as creators may be in the light of the supreme Creator. To do that, I find a useful ally in the work of writer and theologian Dorothy L. Sayers, particularly her triune approach to imagination in her book The Mind of the Maker.
Sayers the Creator
While she is known and respected in certain circles, many Christians may have little familiarity with Dorothy L. Sayers (1893-1957). Most, however, know of her friend (and occasional intellectual sparring partner) C. S. Lewis, and Gina Dalfonzo has recently written on their fifteen-year friendship. While they were different in certain key respects, both were well-educated—in the literary, philosophical, and theological senses—and shared a desire to see Christians contribute fruitfully to the arts.
Though Sayers grew up around Oxford University and would eventually become a public intellectual, her life at times veered away from academia. In the 1920s, fresh off publishing a book of poems, she became very successful at developing advertisement slogans. Around the same time, she began her series of mystery novels featuring the jaunty aristocrat Lord Peter Wimsey, and she is regarded alongside writers like Agatha Christie as one of the best in the genre.
During World War II, however, Sayers increasingly began to speak and write on theological issues. She was especially interested in encouraging a return to classic creedal Christian orthodoxy and developing a robust idea of Christian vocation in the face of an increasingly technology-centered era of mass-production. Her greatest theological work, The Mind of the Maker (1941), combines those two concerns. And the rest of her life would be marked by increased effort at producing memorable works, culminating in her project to craft a faithful rhymed translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy.
Creators and the Creator
As a Christian who often worked in the realm of creative arts, Sayers had a burning interest in one key question: what does it mean to be a creative Christian? There’s clearly one thing it didn’t mean to her: writing tracts or Gospel-centered propaganda. She felt so strongly about this that she provocatively titled one of her essays “Playwrights Are Not Evangelists.” As Dalfonzo notes, C. S. Lewis’s own commitment to writing books across subjects, often as apparently explicit apologetic texts, led to the biggest fight in their fifteen-year friendship (though it’s unclear how much they actually differed in substance).
But if being a creative Christian is not just evangelizing, what is her alternative? To Sayers, the first duty of Christians in any field is to do their work well. In practice, that means a commitment to understanding the rules guiding quality work in their domains and that creating exemplary products within those rules. Imagine two carpenters, both Christians. One carpenter crafts an exquisitely wrought chair from mahogany, carefully detailed and connected by fine joinery. The other puts together a flimsy pine chair held together by hurriedly hammered nails but then carves John 3:16 on his piece. Which of these is the faithful Christian artist? Sayers would claim it is the first, as she fiercely proclaimed in her essay “Why Work?”:
The Church’s approach to an intelligent carpenter is usually confined to exhorting him not to be drunk and disorderly in his leisure hours, and to come to church on Sundays. What the Church should be telling him is this: that the very first demand that his religion makes upon him is that he should make good tables. Church by all means, and decent forms of amusement, certainly – but what use is all that if in the very center of his life and occupation he is insulting God with bad carpentry? No crooked table legs or ill-fitting drawers ever, I dare swear, came out of the carpenter’s shop at Nazareth. Nor, if they did, could anyone believe that they were made by the same hand that made Heaven and earth. No piety in the worker will compensate for work that is not true to itself; for any work that is untrue to its own technique is a living lie. Yet in Her own buildings, in Her own ecclesiastical art and music, in Her hymns and prayers, in Her sermons and in Her little books of devotion, the Church will tolerate or permit a pious intention to excuse so ugly, so pretentious, so tawdry and twaddling, so insincere and insipid, so bad as to shock and horrify any decent draftsman.
Sayers’s heated perspective on this subject comes from her understanding of the Bible, which she explains in greater depth in The Mind of the Maker. First of all, she contends, human creativity is intricately linked to our status of beings made in the image of God:
[H]ad the author of Genesis anything particular in his mind when he wrote? It is observable that in the passage leading up to the statement about man, he has given no detailed information about God. Looking at man, he sees in him something essentially divine, but when we turn back to see what he says about the original upon which the “image” of God was modeled, we find only the single assertion, “God created.” The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.
So far so good. But Sayers isn’t content to stop there. The Christian God is not merely some generic deity: he exists as Trinity. And, Sayers suggests, the creative impulse in humanity may in certain ways reflect God’s specifically triune nature.
This reflection comes in three aspects, which Sayers identifies as the Idea, the Energy, and the Power, corresponding to the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The Idea is the originating kernel of the artistic product, before the artist has begun actual work, “‘the end in the beginning’ . . . a thing-in-itself quite apart from its awareness or its manifestation,” the germ of a standard that the artist will then measure all his or her creative efforts against. As the Father conceived creation before time began, the creative artist conceives a work formlessly before it is made.
The work of the cosmos was produced through the creative Word, the Logos—the Son. So too, in Sayers’s model, the actual processes by which the artist manifests a work—planning it, producing it, finishing it—represent the Energy. The Son is the member of the Trinity who incarnates and becomes incarnate, just as the artist must “incarnate” his or her art through the effort of completing the idea in the world.
But an artist may have an Idea emerge through Energy yet still produce a lifeless husk of a product…unless it has Power. As the Spirit catalyzes the presence of the Son in the believer, at Pentecost and ever after, a work’s latent Power is the way in which it moves and impacts those who experience it: “Any Idea whose Energy manifests itself in a Pentecost of Power is good from its own point of view.”
Triune Creators
In The Mind of the Maker, Sayers speaks in terms of writing, because that is the discipline she knew, but “what is true of the writer is also true of the painter, the musician, and all workers of creative imagination in whatever form.” And even if one doesn’t fully buy into her thesis, the categories she’s made can provide a helpful way for Christians to think about their own creative activities.
Sayers includes a lengthy chapter in her book called “Scalene Trinities,” demonstrating what can go wrong when writers’ creative “trinities” are not well balanced. Christians working in the arts may find some value in thinking through the ways we can balance out our own creative impulses. When beginning a project, is our Idea strong, a worthwhile conception to pursue further? Investing time in a weak idea may prove frustrating and futile. Can we devote the necessary Energy into creating a final product? Even a good Idea may fail if we cannot order it and “incarnate” it well. And are we able to invest our final work with Power? Art shouldn’t be static—it should move those who experience on a personal, visceral, spiritual level.
As Christian artists, we ought to ask these questions and approach these tasks humbly and prayerfully, not out of pride or ambition, nor with the expectation that there is any magic formula that can automatically give life to our creative endeavors. Yet we also cannot assume that just because we are faithful Christians, our products will be well-made on their own merits; true art requires skill and effort and training, and we can see countless examples of well-meaning, pious Christians who produce art that may be morally good but is artistically bad. As bearers of God’ triune image, we have within us the capacity to make our own beautiful little creations. Sayers’s writings help give us some direction toward transforming that capacity into reality, “incarnating” our creations within God’s greater Creation.
