The wonderful novelist, scholar, translator of Dante, and renaissance woman, Dorothy Sayers, thought that man comes closest to God in the ability that both have to create:
In the beginning God created. He made this and He made that and He saw that it was good. And He created man in His own image; in the image of God created He him; male and female created He them.Thus far the author of Genesis. The expression “in His own image” has occasioned a good deal of controversy. Only the most simple-minded people of any age or nation have supposed the image to be a physical one. The innumerable pictures which display the Creator as a hirsute old gentleman in flowing robes seated on a bank of cloud are recognised to be purely symbolic. The “image”, whatever the author may have meant by it, is something shared by male and female alike; the aggressive masculinity of the pictorial Jehovah represents power, rationality or what you will: it has no relation to the text I have quoted. Christian doctrine and tradition, indeed, by language and picture, sets its face against all sexual symbolism for the divine fertility. Its Trinity is wholly masculine, as all language relating to Man as a species is masculine. (cf. St. Augustine: On the Trinity; Bk. XII, Chap. V.)…
The Jews, keenly alive to the perils of pictorial metaphor, forbade the representation of the Person of God in graven images. Nevertheless, human nature and the nature of human language defeated them. No legislation could prevent the making of verbal pictures: God walks in the garden, He stretches out His arm, His voice shakes the cedars, His eyelids try the children of men. To forbid the making of pictures about God would be to forbid thinking about God at all, for man is so made that he has no way to think except in pictures. But continually, throughout the history of the Jewish-Christian Church, the voice of warning has been raised against the power of the picture-makers: “God is a spirit”, 1 “without body, parts or passions”;2 He is pure being, “I AM THAT I AM”.3 (1 St. John iv. 24. – 2 Articles of Religion, I. – 3 Exodus iv. 14.)
Man, very obviously, is not a being of this kind; his body, parts and passions are only too conspicuous in his make-up. How then can he be said to resemble God? Is it his immortal soul, his rationality, his self-consciousness, his free will, or what, that gives him a claim to this rather startling distinction? A case may be argued for all these elements in the complex nature of man. But had 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 modelled, 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.
This experience of the creative imagination in the common man or woman and in the artist is the only thing we have to go upon in entertaining and formulating the concept of creation. Outside our own experience of procreation and creation we can form no notion of how anything comes into being. The expressions “God the Father” and “God the Creator” are thus seen to belong to the same category-that is, of analogies based on human experience, and limited or extended by a similar mental process in either case.
If all this is true, then it is to the creative artists that we should naturally turn for an exposition of what is meant by those credal formulae which deal with the nature of the Creative Mind. Actually, we seldom seem to consult them in the matter. Poets have, indeed, often communicated in their own mode of expression truths identical with the theologians’ truths; but just because of the difference in the modes of expression, we often fail to see the identity of the statements. The artist does not recognise that the phrases of the creeds purport to be observations of fact about the creative mind as such, including his own; while the theologian, limiting the application of the phrases to the divine Maker, neglects to inquire of the artist what light he can throw upon them from his own immediate apprehension of truth. The confusion is as though two men were to argue fiercely whether there was a river in a certain district or whether, on the contrary, there was a measurable volume of H2O moving in a particular direction with an ascertainable velocity; neither having any suspicion that they were describing the same phenomenon.
Our minds are not infinite; and as the volume of the world’s knowledge increases, we tend more and more to confine ourselves, each to his special sphere of interest and to the specialised metaphor belonging to it. The analytic bias of the last three centuries has immensely encouraged this tendency, and it is now very difficult for the artist to speak the language of the theologian, or the scientist the language of either. But the attempt must be made; and there are signs everywhere that the human mind is once more beginning to move. towards a synthesis of experience.
[...] Creativity and Divinity [...]
Desire and creation are somethings that have been on mind lately. I’ve been reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, and although I do not agree with her on all things (like laissez faire capitalism), I am seeing a truth in her work on selfishness, not in the grasping childish greedy way, but in the fulfillment of the desire to create and accomplish.
Strange how science and theology are sounding alike, as well as how people are starting to see that ideas matter.
I’m afraid that Rand’s notions about selfishness are, like almost all of her world view, much too self-centered to correspond to reality. This is a general fault with conservatism.
The greatest artists are not those whose desire to create is strongest; they are people who can let go of their Selves in the act of creation, who can let the work take shape without their forcing it, who can become conduits for the birth of the work.
In the act of creation, if Self disappears, the work truly is a child of the universe.
I’m not sure that the selfishness she touts is too self-centered, but I do think that her ideas have been co-opted by some people who would love to only entertain the idea of a world in which they were the cold, hard center.
I think there comes a point in the creation of art where you do have to let go of yourself, but in a way that the work becomes unseflconsciously an extension of yourself. That whole ‘being in the zone’ thing, acting and reacting without too much thought but being the guider and the unguided at the same time.
I’m not an Ayn Rand defender. I think some of her ideas are too cold and too dogmatic, but I do think to dismiss all of her ideas based on the stigma that has been attached to her work maybe too easy a fix.
But then again, I haven’t finished the Atlas Shrugged, only The Fountainhead, so I could be wrong.
[...] is passionately written (and is similar to this beautiful passage by Dorothy Sayers.) But it’s thesis is at the core of my criticism of current art, as well as [...]
I like Sayers’ passage because I once believed what she believes. She is passionate. I also believe what you say billap, that the greatest artists let go of their Selves and go directly to the source. But the artists themselves are not a unique source of creation and they don’t necessarily have knowledge of the source from which they create. Spirituality is having knowledge of the source, regardless of what you create. This is a misconception of art and artists in culture. Being one doesn’t give a free pass to Knowing the source even if you’re a conduit for it.
See my latest post for a fuller (perhaps too full) explanation and a link to a similar article.