In My Life as a Reader, I have stumbled onto books, both
good and ill, in a multitude of ways (indeed, a history of how I came to read
all the books I have ever read could potentially be an interesting thing to
read (well, interesting to me...perhaps…though the longer I toy with this idea,
the more I think it might be a rather dull catalogue in the end)), but I cannot
recall an example as circuitous as the Story of How I came to Read the Book at
Hand.
Last year, I was the outside reader on a thesis in Studio
Art.
(For those unacquainted with the
details of Mount Holyoke College Faculty Legislation: 1) Why have you not yet
read this fine publication? (you can read it
here), and, more to the point, 2)
part of the senior thesis process at Mount Holyoke is a thesis defense which requires
at least one of the examiners to be from outside the department in which the
thesis is being done.)
(And, by the way,
the thesis, which is not the subject of this here rumination, was good—some rather
interesting Art (with a capital A).)
I
was talking with the student doing the thesis (Ashley), and she mentioned that
she was extraordinarily interested in the idea of the Trinity; that paradox was
much like the way she thought about her Art; in fact she was puzzling out how
to express the Trinity in art.
(And lest
the Reader get the wrong idea, for Ashley, not exactly a devout Christian, this
was a matter of art, not religious devotion.)
Her remarks immediately triggered in the recesses of my mind a hazy
memory:
Augustine, in one of his myriad works
had some sort of thing where he compared the Trinity to the process of making
art, or something like that, but it the whole memory was pretty fuzzy since I
never actually read this bit in Augustine, I just remember reading about how he
wrote about it, but I couldn’t remember where I read that fact, so rather than
send Ashley off to the library with that sort of vague mandate to find a work I
could only vaguely remember, I promised to look it up for her.
After she left, I started pulling my volumes
of Augustine off the shelf looking for the passage about which I had that dim memory
of having once seen mentioned.
It wasn’t
in
The Trinity, nor in any other book of his I had.
So, I puzzled.
Then it hit me—it wasn’t Augustine, it was
Dorothy Sayers.
The Mind of the Maker.
Augustine: Sayers…memory is a fickle beast
. (Augustine had something to say about that,
but I digress.)
I subsequently recommended Sayers’ book to Ashley. She came in a few days later telling me how
amazing the book was. I was, to be
honest, a bit surprised. I’d never read
the book (obviously) because the idea of explaining the Trinity by talking about
artists struck me as an intellectual dead end, the sort of thing someone
grasping at straws would throw together in an off-hand way in the vain hope
that maybe it just might work. Yet here
was this thoroughly secular student telling me how amazing this work of Christian
theology was. Obviously, I needed to
read the book.
I did. It is
amazing. It can be read as an attempt to
explain the Trinity, I suppose, but it is much better read as an attempt to explain
the artist. As Sayers argues: God created us in His image and thus God is a
creator, so if we are created in His image, then that means, in part, that we
are created as creators. An utterly
absorbing idea, that. Our urge to create
is the very spark of divinity.
To be a good creator is thus to have all three of the
aspects of the Godhead. We need the
controlling idea, the means to cause the idea to become incarnate and the power
to enable the creation to work in the world.
Artists fail when they are either too driven by one part of that trinity
or when one of the parts atrophies.
Indeed, Sayers notes the distinction between the Father Driven artists, possessed
of an intellectual idea with no means of expressing it; the Son Driven artists with the tools to express, but nothing
to be expressed; and the Spirit driven artists who imagine they can work their
Power on the world with neither Idea not a means to express an idea. (Undergraduate artists are almost always that
last group—nothing to say, and no skill at saying it, yet they spew their emotions
onto the page.) (And just for the record,
Ashley was not Spirit driven; if I had to say, I think she is Father Driven in
Sayers’ framework. Interesting art. You just might hear about her someday.)
The summary does not even begin to capture the feel of the
book, however. Writing this review feels
like trying to express an Idea with shabby equipment, rapidly decaying. So, I’ll change the question: for what audience is this book intended? Before reading it, I assumed it was a work of Christian
apologetics, belonging, as I noted above, in the (rather large) set of futile
attempts to explain the Trinity to Human minds. Said attempts are an exemplar
of an impossible task. But, Sayers’ book
isn’t in that set at all. To be sure, one
learns a great deal about the Trinity from reading this book, but it doesn’t attempt
to explain the Trinity. Indeed, I’m not convinced
that the Trinity is really what this book is best at explaining. I think it is much better seen as an exploration
of the human artist. At that task, it is
an utterly brilliant book. And, I suspect
a terribly neglected book by the very people who would most profit from reading
it. The neglect comes from the general
aversion to all things religious.
Imagine a book explaining artists which takes as a given that we can gain
a better understanding of the artistic mind by thinking about the mind of the
Maker of the maker. Now imagine the
hurdle which will have to be overcome to convince an artist who denies the existence
of the Prime Maker to read a book showing how the mind of that maker explains
the artist’s mind.
It’s too bad. Many a
secular artists would enjoy this book a great deal. Many a Christian would also enjoy this book,
but will be put off by the realization that it is about artists. Christian Artists? Well,
sadly, there are far too few of them (well, there are too few of them with
enough talent to merit the title of Artist, as opposed to ones who fancy
themselves artists) to know what they would make of this book.
