Dorothy L Sayers: creative mind and the holy trinity

Abstract

Human beings have no language with which to speak about God and their experiences of God except that language which they also use of themselves and of their experiences of each other. The doctrine of the Trinity points to the presence and action of God in the world through Jesus Christ. The search for human analogies with the doctrine of the Trinity has occupied the minds and hearts of theologians and philosophers since earliest Christian times. Many of the attempts made to provide a paradigm by which the Holy Trinity might best be articulated in human thinking have fallen short of the ideals at which they aimed. As a result, there is a paucity of material from which the teacher of theology may draw in explicating this apparently most complicated of doctrines. While the search was confined to the field of pure theology, it seemed fruitless. Dorothy L Sayers, a writer of detective novels, engaged in that search almost by accident as she moved from detective fiction to religious drama in the second phase of her writing career. By using her own experience of creative activity, she saw a striking resemblance between the creative activity of God and that of God's creatures. That this activity possessed a threefold structure allowed Sayers to discern a human analogy with the doctrine of the Trinity which would serve where others had failed. Her thinking was set out in her book The Mind of the Maker in 1941. However, her achievement in this volume has largely been ignored. It is time for a re-appraisal of that achievement in order both to re-present it to those engaged in theological deliberations now and to investigate how it was received in its own day and why it may have been overlooked hitherto.