Dorothy Sayers Archives - James E Hartley

The Inherent Virtues of Commerce

“Dear Cleinias, the class of men is small . . . who, when assailed by wants and desires, are able to hold out and observe moderation, and when they might make a great deal of money are sober in their wishes, and prefer a moderate to a large gain. But the mass of mankind are the very opposite: their desires are unbounded, and when they might gain in moderation they prefer gains without limit; wherefore all that relates to retail trade, and merchandise, and the keeping of taverns, is denounced and numbered among dishonorable things.”

That is Plato in the Laws. He is outdone by Aristotle who in the Politics advocates banning any merchants from the state, since “such a life is ignoble and inimical to virtue.” It isn’t just the Greeks who disparage commerce. Aquinas says that a merchant who works to enrich himself is a rather despicable creature, “justly deserving of blame, because, considered in itself, it satisfies the greed for gain, which knows no limit and tends to infinity.”

One of the interesting things about reading old books is how modern they sometimes seem. You don’t dig very deep into Left or Right political commentary to find remarks disparaging the multinational industrial capitalist economy. The Left wants to replace it with some sort of edenic international socialist state. The Right wants to replace it with some sort of edenic national religious state.

But both conservative and liberal market critics claim that large corporations are being run by greedy CEOs who care only about becoming mind-bogglingly wealthy, tossing the concerns of the poor working classes into the ashbins. Indeed, these capitalist swine in pursuit of riches do what they can to corrupt the government and thwart the will of all those decent not-so-wealthy people who just want to live satisfying lives.

But a profit motive does not necessarily entail systematic social corruption as ancient and modern naysayers of open markets suggest. An individual working in the economic order does not cease to be a moral person simply because he has a profit motive. It is possible to run an ethical business—to treat your employees and customers the right way, the way you would like to be treated yourself—and still generate profits.

Can the case for commercial activity be made stronger? Is there a fundamental answer to the charges of immorality leveled by Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and their modern counterparts? Is it possible to argue that commercial activity is inherently virtuous, that it does not need to be tolerated as a necessary evil, but rather should be embraced as a positive good?

Read the rest at Public Discourse

You Are a Creator

Imagine you were going to describe God to someone. What is the first thing you would say about God?

Compare your answer to this: what is the first thing the Bible tells us about God?

God is a Creator.

Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker is an extended reflection on this idea. Like many a Great Book it roams all over the place, but for a moment, think about her central thesis. If we want to understand the Trinitarian God, we can begin by thinking about the creative human.

Genesis actually tells us to do this. On the sixth day, when God creates Human (which is what the Hebrew word ‘adam means), Genesis tells us God creates Human in His own image.

And what is the only image of God which the text has presented to this point in the narrative? God is a creator. God the creator creates Human in His image. God creates creators.

How does Creativity work according to Sayers?

First there is the Idea, the controlling thought.

Then there is the Energy, the actual implementation of the idea.

Then there is the Power, the effect of the implementation of the idea.

Think of a book. There is the idea in the mind of the author (what is this book attempting to say?), the actual words of the book (how can the author’s idea be communicated?), and the effect the book has on the reader (what does the reader think or feel after reading the book?).

God the Father is the Idea; God the Son is the energy; God the Holy Spirit is the Power. All work together as one creator, no part can be removed and still have the Creator intact, each part is distinct and yet fully the being of the Creator.

Like all analogies of the Trinity, this one breaks down if you lean on it too hard. But, the importance of Sayers’ book is not as another attempt to explain the Trinity. Rather, the book is a marvelous examination of the idea of Creativity.

If Sayers is right, then we, created in the image of God, are created to be creators. All of us.

We will not all become Michelangelo or Shakespeare or T.S. Eliot or Bach. We will not all be famous. But, there is inside each of us an inner creator screaming to be let out.

Our problem is that we often do not let out the creator within.

As Sayers notes, the image of the perfect Creator is one in which all three parts are equally there, an equilateral triangle. 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.

But we are all too often scalene triangles (unequal sides). Artists fail when they are either too driven by one part of that trinity or when one of the parts atrophies.

(Remember when you took Geometry? When you asked why you need to learn the subject, did your teacher say, “So you can think about God”?)

Sayers notes the distinction between
1. the Father Driven artists, possessed of an intellectual idea but never learning the craft of expressing their ideas;
2. the Son Driven artists with the tools to express, but nothing to be expressed; and
3. the Spirit driven artists who imagine they can work their Power on the world with neither Idea nor a Means to express an idea.

(Sadly, 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.)

None of us are perfect Creators. Indeed, most of us are very bad at it. But, our lack of moral perfection is not an excuse to cease from trying to do the right thing. Similarly, our lack of creative perfection should not stop us from creating.

So, create something today. Write a poem, even a bad one. Draw a picture. Put a plant in a pot or arrange some flowers in a vase. Cook a meal you have never made before. Tell a friend about something you read and awaken in that friend the desire to read it too.

You are made in the image of the Creator God. So: Create.

The Quest for Answers

During graduation weekend, I gave a talk encouraging the students to never cease asking the important questions in life. Questions like: Does your life have a purpose? What is a Good life?

A student stopped by the next day to talk about it. She was worried. How could she possibly ever find a definitive answer to hard questions like that?

My student’s question is an interesting one, but not for the reason she imagined.

In the final chapter of Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker, she makes a distinction between problems of the sort found in detective novels (of which she wrote some truly great ones, e.g., Gaudy Night) and “life-problems.”

She notes there are four characteristics of a detective mystery. People want to find these same characteristics in real life. But, “because we are accustomed to find them in the one, we look for them in the other, and experience a sense of frustration and resentment when we do not find them.”

The four characteristics:

1. The detective problem is always soluble.

2. The detective problem is completely soluble.

3. The detective problem is solved in the same terms in which it is set.

4. The detective problem is finite.

Sayers is entirely correct about detective problems. A mystery novel is completely unsatisfying if there is no solution, if there are loose, unexplained ends, if there is some deus ex machina needed to wrap the thing up, or if there is no finality. We like mystery novels exactly because they give this sense of completeness.

But, then when we turn to the problems of life, none of these things exist.

The answer to my student is quite simply that she may indeed never find a definitive answer to the important questions of life.

That does not mean, however, that she should not constantly strive to find those answers. The quest to find the answers matters.

Why should we spend our lives wrestling with overwhelming questions for which we may never find a satisfactory answer?

First of all, we don’t have a choice. Our minds seem to be built to be constantly peering into the unknown to learn just a little bit more. Our minds seem to be built to stare at the world in wonder. Our minds seem to be built in a way the leaves us asking, “Why am I here?”

But, perhaps more importantly, we need to think about the unanswerable questions because it is very important to constantly remind ourselves that is it perfectly OK if we don’t have it all figured out.

You see people all the time who try to wrap up all of life in a neat little ball, who have an answer to everything, who never want to say, “I don’t know. I haven’t figured that out yet.”

Such people, without really realizing what they have done, have set themselves up as a local deity, all knowing and all wise.

Sooner or later, however, the person who has it all figured out meets a question for which they do not and then what happens? The walls go up. The question is ruled out of bounds or trivialized or corrupted into something answerable.

Theology is far too often like that. When we contemplate God, should we ever expect to figure Him out?

You will never have all the answers. Acknowledge the existence of mystery. And then. never cease exploring that mystery even knowing you will never find all the answers.

Is This My Autobiography?

From Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker:

“But the writing of autobiography is a dangerous business; it is a mark either of great insensitiveness to danger or of an almost supernatural courage. Nobody but a god can pass unscathed through the searching ordeal of incarnation.”

Sayers is using that observation as the conclusion of a chapter discussing the writing of autobiography, a particular form of art which has obvious relevance to a rather noteworthy Creative Act of God. What follows is not directly related to what Sayers is arguing, but, since Sayers was writing a Great Book, it set my mind wandering into all sorts of directions.

After reading Sayers’ chapter on autobiography, I got to ruminating about my own life (shocking) and once again faced the realization that a biography of my life would be pretty dull stuff.

When I have said this to people in the past, there is almost always an immediate objection. It seems that saying one’s life would make a dull biography is taken as a strong version of self-deprecation.

There is apparently rampant confusion of the two sentences: 1) “My biography would be dull” and 2) “My life is worthless.”

But, those two sentences are not even remotely the same. My life is not worthless, yet I have a hard time imagining anyone wanting to read a book-length treatment of it. I was born, grew up, went to school, got married, got a job, had kids. Nothing exciting there. So, I cannot even imagine writing an autobiography.

This made me wonder about whether Sayers’ remarks quoted above were accurate or not. How would I know?

Then it hit me. I have a blog. This blog has no real content other than a Faithful Record of My Thoughts over Time. Which strangely sounds a lot like autobiography. Am I writing an autobiography without even knowing it? The mind reels.

If so, which is it: do I have an insensitivity (Sayers’ “insensitiveness” is a rather ugly word, no?) to danger or a supernatural courage?

Clearly the former. Then again, there really isn’t much of a danger here—after all, I am a tenured professor.

(My wife is constantly worried that my blog will somehow lead to some dire result, but when pressed, she can never actually figure out what could actually happen to me if someone (who?) took offense. My wife has neither an insensitivity to danger nor supernatural courage—and perhaps not coincidentally, she doesn’t write autobiography. More from my wife anon.)

Pursuing the Blog as Autobiography line a bit further: is this blog an honest autobiography?

As Sayers notes, no autobiography can be the whole of the author, it is inherently a partial revelation due to the limitation of the form. Obviously I am more than my blog.

But, if we imagine handing a set of blog entries to a person who knew nothing about me, would the impression formed from nothing other than what was written in this place bear any resemblance to Reality? What strange creature would be conjured up by the contents herein?

That is one of those questions which would generate an answer which it is probably better not to know. Yet, it is also one of those questions that once asked, makes one wonder.

And then: if this blog is a form of autobiography, then perhaps my autobiography isn’t as dull as I would have thought. While my conventional biography would be quite dull, I have read some Great Books and had some Great Conversations over the years, and a record of those books and conversations is potentially not without interest.

And suddenly I realized that the most famous biography of all time details a life in which absolutely nothing happens—one reads Boswell to see Johnson’s wit, not his activities.

At this stage in my ruminations, I broached the subject at the dinner table. Lo and behold, my wife was channeling Samuel Johnson. She quickly concluded that blogs were akin to autobiography.

However she added that blogs were much worse than autobiography. Traditional autobiography required that the contents pass muster with an editor before they were broadcast to the world. Blogs have no such editor.

These days, anybody can feel free to broadcast his life and thoughts to the world, whether such writing is worthy of attention or not (and for some reason, my wife looked at Your Humble Narrator with a knowing glance when mentioning the latter option).

Insensitive to the danger (see above), I then asked why people would feel the need to write an autobiography. “Narcissism.” My wife didn’t miss a beat in giving that answer. Blogging is the ultimate form of narcissism, concluded my wife. One assumes that one’s every thought is worthy of attention and so one blogs.

Apparently my wife thinks I am a Narcissist.