Some people might wonder why, if I’m going to choose something by Dorothy L. Sayers to call a ‘classic’, I haven’t gone for The Man Born to be King, her cycle of radio plays first broadcast in late 1941. They were controversial, but fabulously successful, and repeated and adapted many times since. I remember going as a child to a stage version put on by our local amateur dramatic group in the 1960s. But although this is probably what Sayers is known for today (apart, that is, from her detective fiction featuring Lord Peter Wimsey), nonetheless I want to propose a different text, her book-length reflection on the doctrine of the Trinity, The Mind of the Maker. It was also written in 1941, and I do not actually know what prompted her to write it, but it marked an important stage in her development as a Christian apologist. She was even offered a Lambeth DD by William Temple in the wake of its publication, but declined for reasons that are not altogether clear, though she did say that she thought she could be of greater help to the faith as a literary figure unencumbered by ecclesiastical titles. Susan Howatch, in a 1994 reissue, speculates she may also have been motivated by the fear that, if the fact of her being the mother of an illegitimate child were to come to light, it would be an embarrassment to the Church.
Sayers by then was one of those notable literary figure, like T.S. Eliot, Charles Williams, C.S. Lewis, amongst others, who had become prominent as defenders of Anglican Christianity, not necessarily in any sort of sectarian or ‘confessional’ sense, but simply as Anglican believers who were prepared to make a public profession of their faith. Born in 1893, she was the daughter of a clergyman, so in some ways her later public profile was not altogether surprising. All the same, she had had a somewhat unconventional if also brilliant youth, with study at Oxford followed by teaching and then work as an advertising copywriter, with a number of affairs including one which led to the birth of her son John in 1924 (who was actually brought up in foster care). The success of her detective fiction, however, enabled her to leave advertising and devote herself to writing. Increasingly preoccupied with religious themes, the great task of her life in her last two decades was a new translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, not quite complete at her death in 1957.
The Mind of the Maker is in some ways, then, an outlier in Sayers’ work, a theological treatise that she cannot have thought was likely to reach an audience as wide as her novel-reading public. It is lucidly written, but quite dense in argumentation. It cites numerous theologians and philosophers, sometimes at length. It is dedicated to elucidating the way in which the Christian doctrine of the Trinity ‘hangs together’ and makes sense. In that sense it is first and foremost an apologetic, explicating the profoundest mystery at the heart of Christian faith. Was Sayers trying to turn herself in a different direction, towards that of traditional dogmatics? Any thought that this was a work which Sayers foolishly thought might amount to some sort of original systematic theology ought to be dispelled on reading just the first few sentences of her ‘Preface’. She actually denies that the book is an apology for Christianity; most readers would probably beg to differ, but she may have had other popular apologetic writers in mind and wanted to distance herself from them. But then she adds, suggestively, “It is a commentary, in the light of specialised knowledge, on a particular set of statements made in the Christian creed”. (p. xiii) Those are my italics – this single phrase is the key to the whole method of the book. What is her ‘specialised knowledge’? It is precisely that of an imaginative writer, a writer of fiction, a dramatist and novel-writer. Sayers intends to approach the doctrine of the Trinity with her ideas, experience and practice as a writer foremost, to explore how we might understand it in the light of the creative processes of a writer. That’s why the title is as it is – this is an imaginative exploration of the ‘mind’ of God. It’s also why the ancient author who hovers above this text above all, and threads through it, is Augustine and his great treatise on the Trinity, in which time and again Sayers finds echoes of the view she is trying to articulate.
In a sense, once you have caught on to the central analogy of the book, you have the main part of it. But the effect of reading, I suggest, is cumulative. Sayers takes this analogy, and through it explores such central aspects of Christian doctrine and the theology of the Trinity as the imago Dei, the work of creation, free will, the nature of incarnation, and the love which binds the Creator to the creature. In tune with what I’d hold is the apologetic purpose of the book, Sayers’ goal is not to create a systematic exposition building on the traditional sources of Christian theology – Scripture and Church tradition – but to show us how the Christian understanding of God is credible. Just as we do not doubt the creative author’s ability to summon up their ‘creations’ from seeming nothing, and to inhabit them, to ‘own’ them and design them, and at the same time to give them the freedom to develop as figures which have their own imagined autonomy, so God conceives and executes the process of creation, and gives of himself in it through his Son and Spirit. And that image of the ‘mind’ of God runs through the whole book. So, for example, in describing the energy through which the act of creation takes place, she says “Actually…what happens in the writer’s mind is something like this. When making a character he in a manner separates and incarnates a part of his own living mind.” (p. 40)
But Sayers is also aware of the limits of what she is trying to do. Not only does she frequently admit to her own flaws as a theologian and philosopher of religion (though my goodness would that we could all write as she does!), but she has a healthy sense of the way this central analogy breaks down, when we turn from the human act of artistic creation to the divine act. As she says,
“The whole of existence is held to be the work of the Divine Creator – everything that there is, including not only the human maker and his human public, but all other entities ‘visible and invisible’ that may exist outside this universe. Consequently, whereas the human writer obtains his response from other minds, outside and independent of his own, God’s response comes only from His own creatures. This is as though a book were written to be read by the characters within it. And further: the universe is not a finished work.” (p.103)
Another striking dimension is that, turned round, the book is also a meditation on the nature of authorship. Just as Sayers uses the analogy of the creative artist to elaborate something of the ‘mind’ of God, or at least a kind of echo or shadow of it, so in doing so she also successively reveals just what she thinks the human act of artistic creation involves. The struggles and sacrifices of the author come alive in her work. So do the contradictions of human creation. At one point she observers that the human author cannot but be aware of the same “paradoxical need” of divine creation, which she describes as “the complete independence of the creature combined with his willing co-operation in his [the writer’s] purpose in conformity with the law of its nature”. (p. 111)
Sayers was not alone in making this analogy between human creativity and divine act. Austin Farrer does something similar in A Science of God? (1966). Perhaps Farrer was even influenced by Sayers here. Famously, of course, the Catholic systematic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar made it the nodal point of his five-volume Theo-Drama (1973-83). Probably von Balthasar had never even heard of Dorothy Sayers. But when I stand back from the detail of her work, I can’t help but think that here is something remarkable – a committed Anglican laywoman who wrote a startlingly original, alert, probing study of the ‘mind’ of God, and the analogy with the Trinity, in the depths of war and in the challenges of her own life, a study which in its own way bears comparison with the efforts of more established, ‘professional’ theologians.
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