All posts tagged Dorothy Sayers
I'm not always wearing my full habit...
There is a difference between saying: “If you hold your finger in the fire you will get burned” and saying, “if you whistle at your work I shall beat you, because the noise gets on my nerves.” The God of the Christians is too often looked upon as an old gentlemen of irritable nerves who beats people for whistling.
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
… trying to draw a distinction between two different types of statement that are both called laws. One is a “law of nature,” which humans cannot overturn; the other is a law created by humans, that we can choose to follow or not. Without adding an outside object, like a glove, I can’t keep my finger from getting burned in the fire. But I can choose to whistle, and I can choose to fight back when you beat me, and you can even choose not to beat me because you know I’m just playing with you.
In the creeds of Christendom [Apostles’ Creed, Nicene Creed, Athanasian Creed], we are confronted with a set of documents which purport to be not expressions of opinion but statements of fact. Some of these statements are historical, and … others are theological, which means that they claim to be statements of fact about the nature of God and the universe.
Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
This is an excellent quick definition for theology. And I love how she follows up:
The proper question to be asked about any creed is not ‘Is it pleasant?’ but ‘Is it true?’
The Christian affirmation is that the Trinitarian structure which can be shown to exist in the mind of man and in all his works is, in fact, the integral structure of the universe, and corresponds, not by pictorial imagery but by a necessary uniformity of substance, with the nature of God, in whom all that is, exists.
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
Undercover Nun is fascinated by the idea that God’s essential nature as three-in-one and one-in-three is reflected not only in our minds but in the structure of the universe. I’ve long been intrigued by the triples that show up in faiths throughout the world, and I’ve occasionally toyed with the idea that perhaps an underlying truth can be inferred from these sacred threes.
Of course, there are also lots of sacred fours and sacred sevens and probably even sacred prime-numbers. This may be entirely random. And there’s very little in scripture that demands that the Christian God must be trinitarian in nature and not dual, quadruple, septuple, or merely a unity. But it is an intriguing idea to play with, and I’d far rather look at the ways we are alike and the things we have in common than at all the things that split us apart and separate us.
