Book Club: Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker{Chapter 2}

Ahem.

This whole chapter is really focusing on the idea of analogical knowledge. I could probably spend much time meditating upon the quote from Aquinas on the opening page, which include this striking idea:

[W]e arrive at the knowledge of God from other things.

He’re referring here to analogy, and he uses as his example the names of God, which help us to know more about Him…by analogy.

A few years ago, Cindy somehow convinced me that analogy and metaphor {and thus, I assume, the dreaded simile} were important. Even though I didn’t quite grasp why, I allowed them to gain ground in our schooling, and we even developed a bit of a family game in which we try to say that one thing is like another. Bonus points are earned for being funny.

I’m sure the it’s as itchy as the chicken pox line is only a few days out.

Ahem.

So basically metaphor and analogy are important. They are how we come to know things. We rarely know things–especially important things–directly.

Oh. And I’m not exactly sure why. I hope to find out when I read the entries of the others, which I haven’t done because I usually don’t read until I’ve written my own post.

I spent a bit of time deciding if I agreed with Sayers on the imago dei referring mostly to our ability to make things. Her argument hangs on the fact that when we are told in Genesis that man is made in the image of God, the only thing we know about God up to that point is that He is Maker. So Sayers jumps to this conclusion:

The characteristic common to God and man is apparently that: the desire and the ability to make things.

I hesitate to question Sayers here because I know her brain is far superior to my brain, but the theologian in me wouldn’t let it go. It seems like a sloppy hermeneutic. Since the Dominion Mandate follows directly after the assertion that man is made in God’s image, it is more likely that it is the mandate itself that defines the image. Man is told to tend and keep, and we can consider this a reflection of the image. Later, we are also told that God breathed the breath of life into Man, and he became a living spirit. Again, we have the image of God, here seen in the idea that Man is a being much in the way that God is a being; though he appear physical, yet is he spiritual.

With all of that said, I found myself having come full circle because, you see, many theologians call the Dominion Mandate the Cultural Mandate. They extrapolate that tending and keeping necessarily lead to all the trappings of culture. Things like government…and even art…would be a logical consequence over time. So you see that I ended up where Sayers did, but by an indirect route.

This is proof that Sayers should be the one writing the book.

As if there was ever any doubt.

Ahem.

The really important part of this chapter is when Sayers tells us what her book is about:

[T]his book is an examination of metaphors about God…

Her intent, then, is to remind us of the limits of metaphor using the example of God-as-Father.

Our own common sense assures us that the metaphor is intended to be drawn from the best kind of father acting within a certain limited sphere of behavior, and is to be applied only to a well-defined number of the divine attributes.

And then she asks that heart stopping question:

[I]s the phrase “God the Creator” metaphorical in the same sense that “God the Father” is clearly metaphorical?

I adored her answer. She brings up that we cannot create ex nihilo but only rearrange matter. But then she explains how our artistic endeavors do verge upon creation out of nothing:

We spend our lives putting matter together in new patterns and so “creating” forms which were not there before. This is so intimate and universsal a function of nature that we scarcely ever think about it. In a sense, even this kind of creation is “creation out of nothing.” Though we cannot create matter, we continually, by rearrangement, create new and unique entities…Nevertheless, we perceive that this is only a very poor and restricted kind of creation.

[snip]

It is the artist who, more than other men, is able to create something out of nothing. A whole artistic work is immeasurably more than the sum of its parts.

[snip]

The poet is not obliged, as it were, to destroy the material of a Hamlet in order to create a Falstaff, as a carpenter must destroy a tree-form to create a table-form. The components of the material world are fixed; those of the world of imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction or rearrangement of what went before. This represents the nearest approach we experience to “creation out of nothing,” and we conceive of the act of absolute creation as being an act analogous to that of the creative artist.

Fascinating, no?

Read More:
-More posts linked at Ordo Amoris
–Buy the book and read along!
-Get Mind of the Maker for free from Willa’s Readlist

Afterthoughts was nominated for the Homeschool Blog Awards in the Best Homeschooling Methods Blog Category as well as the Best Current Events, Opinions or Politics Blog. Thank you kindly for the nominations, friends! Better head on over and vote. Please note that you can vote once per day, per computer. Have fun!