6. The Creative Mind
6
The Creative Mind
Dorothy L. Sayers on Making Sense of Our World
One of the most distinctive features of human nature is our innate yearning to try to make sense of the strange and puzzling world we see around us. We find this desire to understand and explain in the natural sciences, which set out to make sense of the working of the natural world. This can be seen in their emphasis on intelligibility, expressed in the scientific quest to make accounting for natural phenomena logically coherent. Yet this emphasis on making sense of things is found far beyond the realms of the natural sciences. It is found, for example, in Christianity—not, perhaps, as its dominant theme but certainly as an important aspect of its overall vision of reality. Exploring and applying this aspect of Christian faith is, in my view, an integral aspect of the discipleship of the mind.
The philosopher Keith Yandell offers a good account of this aspect of faith: “A religion is a conceptual system that provides an interpretation of the world and the place of human beings in it, bases an account of how life should be lived given that interpretation, and expresses this interpretation and lifestyle in a set of rituals, institutions and practices.”
Perhaps the same point is made more forcefully by psychologists of religion, who stress the importance of religion in the human making of meaning. Religion can provide a comprehensive and integrated framework of meaning that helps to explain our experiences and situations, while providing a way of helping individuals transcend their own experience and connect up with something greater.
There is, of course, more to making sense of reality than simply offering an explanation of things. What of the related notion of coherence, for example, which concerns how things are related to and interconnected with each other? Many would link this pursuit of coherence with a specifically religious agenda: “This is our first demand of religion—that it should illumine life and make it a whole.”
So how do we make sense of things? For the scientist, one of the most important general approaches is that of induction—the generalization from specific examples, in which universal patterns are discerned on the basis of empirical observation. From such observations we generate more general and universal ways of understanding our world, which are expressed in theories and hypotheses.
Charles Peirce, the great American pragmatist philosopher of the nineteenth century, argued that the fundamental principle of scientific thinking was the process he called “abduction”—namely, the attempt to find an intellectual pattern that made sense of what was observed, even if this pattern was not itself disclosed by those observations. Abduction is a kind of nondeductive inference that can be thought of as “the process of forming explanatory hypotheses.” Perhaps most importantly, Peirce argued that this process is a “logical operation” that introduces a “new idea”—an idea that seems to connect up all the observations to disclose a pattern rather than just a random collection of facts.
Peirce invites us to generate theories and explanations, then test them to find out how well they seem to accommodate the evidence. Abduction is the “provisional adoption of an explanatory hypothesis”—an intellectual strategy for generating ideas, explanations, and theories; we then have to confirm the theory by checking it out against observation. As Peirce understands it, abduction is thus a kind of “search strategy” that leads us to generate some “promising explanatory conjecture which is then subject to further test.” For Peirce, the best example of this kind of thinking is found in the natural sciences. Yet the same pattern of thought can be found elsewhere—as in medical diagnosis and detective fiction. Our observations are essentially clues to the deeper meaning or inner workings of our world.
All of this helps us to understand why we like detective novels so much. Writers such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Raymond Chandler, and Dorothy L. Sayers built their reputations on being able to hold their readers’ interest as countless mysterious murder cases were solved before their eyes. We devour the cases of fictional detectives such as Sherlock Holmes, Philip Marlowe, Lord Peter Wimsey, and Miss Jane Marple. These writers skillfully assemble a body of evidence and a series of observations, and challenge us to find the hidden pattern that makes sense of them.
Dorothy L. Sayers (1893–1957) was one of the most widely read authors of the “Golden Age” of British crime fiction, before developing her interest in Christian theology. Sayers saw human beings as searching for “patterns” in life and explored this theme in her Peter Wimsey detective novels as well as her religious writings. How can we find the best explanation of what we observe? Sayers was a shrewd analyst of the complexity of life and offers a rich and nuanced account of why human beings attach so much importance to discerning meaning in life and why we enjoy solving puzzles—whether this relates to the identity of the murderer in Gaudy Night or “ultimate questions,” such as, What is the meaning of life?
Sayers saw her detective novels as being about discerning a pattern within events that pointed to the way in which an intellectual puzzle could be solved. She developed this theme in a lecture that she proposed to broadcast to the French nation in early 1940, to bolster their morale in the early stages of the Second World War, by emphasizing the importance of France as a source of great literary detectives. Unfortunately, Sayers’s talk celebrating the French literary detective was never transmitted to what would doubtless have been an appreciative French public. Paris fell to invading German armies shortly before she was scheduled to speak. Happily, however, the text has survived.
One of the central themes of Sayers’s lecture is that detective fiction appeals to our deep yearning to make sense of what seems to some to be an unrelated series of events. Within those events, however, are the clues, the markers of significance, that can lead to the solution of the mystery. We “follow, step by step, Ariadne’s thread, and finally arrive at the center of the labyrinth.” We need to pause here and focus on the central image of Sayers’s analogy. Steeped in a classical education, Sayers drew on the ancient Greek legend of Minos, king of Crete, who instructed the great architect Daedalus to build a labyrinth near his palace at Knossos to house the Minotaur—a hybrid of a man and a bull. The labyrinth was famously complicated. Once inside its dark passages, it proved impossible for anyone to find the way back out again. Those unfortunate enough to enter were thus doomed to being eaten by the Minotaur. It was just a matter of time.
Having conquered the city of Athens, Minos demanded that every year Athens would send seven maidens and seven youths, as a tribute, to be devoured by the Minotaur. Theseus, son of Aegeus, king of Athens, volunteered to join the band of youths who were to be sent to Crete to be sacrificed. Ariadne, daughter of Minos, fell in love with him and offered to help him conquer the labyrinth and kill the Minotaur if he would marry her and take her away from Crete. He agreed—although, of course, in the end he failed to make good on his promise. Trusting him, Ariadne gave Theseus a ball of red thread, which he unrolled as he entered the labyrinth. Having found and killed the Minotaur, Theseus was able to find his way out of the labyrinth by following the thread back to its source. Ariadne’s thread was the key to finding the way through a dark and confusing structure. Sayers realized how this potent image could be used as an analogy for the intellectual framework within which a detective novel is set.
Sayers, like so many before her, appreciated that the detective novel appeals to our implicit belief in the intrinsic rationality of the world around us and our ability to discover its deeper patterns. Something important or interesting has taken place—such as the mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville—but what really happened? We were not there to observe this event, yet by careful analysis of clues, we may identify the most likely explanation of what actually took place. The image of Ariadne’s thread thus reappears, in the form of a thread of an argument—a way of linking together a series of events or observations so that we can see their underlying pattern. To use an image popularized by the great British philosopher of science William Whewell (1794–1866), we must find the best thread on which to string the pearls of our observations, so that they disclose their true pattern: “The facts are known but they are insulated and unconnected. . . . The pearls are there but they will not hang together until someone provides the string.”
Sayers’s detective novels can be seen as a literary application of what is now known in the philosophy of science as “inference to the best explanation.” For every set of observations, there are several competing explanations. So which of these is the best? Which thread best connects and displays the pearls of our observations? What criteria might be used to make this evaluation? We can see this process of reflection in Sayers’s novel The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, set in London’s high society during the 1920s. Sayers opens the chapter describing Lord Peter Wimsey’s breakthrough in the mystery surrounding the curious death of General Fentiman by reflecting on the criteria that might be used in choosing one theory over another:
“What put you on to this poison business?” [Detective Inspector Parker] asked.
“Aristotle, chiefly,” replied Wimsey. “He says, you know, that one should always prefer the probable impossible to the improbable possible. It was possible, of course, that the General should have died off in that neat way at the most confusing moment. But how much nicer and more probable that the whole thing had been stage-managed.”
While some professional philosophers might wince at Sayers’s appeal to Aristotle, her point is perfectly reasonable. Once Wimsey had found this pattern, he was able to superimpose it on the otherwise puzzling series of events at the Bellona Club and show how these threads were woven together in his intellectual solution, disclosing a pattern that linked what would otherwise have seemed to be disconnected events.
At points, Sayers’s critics felt that her detective novels displayed an excessive concern for the discernment of abstract patterns rather than exploring the complexity of human motivations and ambitions. Raymond Chandler, for example, felt that Sayers had become absorbed with the issue of “logic and deduction,” so that the “artificial pattern required by the plot” came to overwhelm the plausibility of her characters, in effect forcing them to do some “unreal things” in order to fit this template. Sayers herself later came to appreciate such concerns, expressing misgivings about the tendency to see detective fiction simply as a deductive assault on a set of data, ignoring issues of human character and the ambiguous status of evidence.
For Sayers, life was also to be seen as a quest for a pattern of meaning. She was convinced that Christianity gave her a tool by which she might “make sense of the universe,” disclosing hidden patterns and allowing meaning to be discerned within its otherwise opaque mysteries. If The Nine Tailors addressed the mysteries of the universe, Gaudy Night engaged the mysteries of the human heart. Her partly autobiographical work, Cat O’Mary, makes reference to this quest for meaning and the intellectual pleasure it brought to its central character, Katherine: “When Katherine sat down to prepare a passage of Molière, she experienced the actual physical satisfaction of plaiting and weaving together innumerable threads to make a pattern, a tapestry, a created beauty.”
Sayers came to believe that such patterns were not human inventions, but represented a pattern of the creative mind, itself echoing the deeper patterns of divine rationality. Sayers prized the rationalizing capacity of Christianity so greatly that she occasionally wondered if she had actually fallen in love with its intellectual patterns rather than its content—above all, the historical figure of Jesus Christ. Perhaps the work that deals with this theme in greatest detail is her classic work The Mind of the Maker (1941).
Sayers was not a professional theologian; however, it is clear that her Mind of the Maker is essentially an outworking of her own distinct notion of the “image of God” in humanity as a kind of imaginative template, which predisposes human beings to think and imagine in certain ways. The “same pattern of the creative mind” is evident in both theology and art, and points to a deeper inbuilt imaginative template that enables and encourages human beings to discern patterns in the deepest aspects of life. Sayers was inclined to think that the pattern of human creative processes “correspond[s] to the actual structure of the living universe,” so that the “pattern of the creative mind” is an “eternal Idea” rooted in the being of God.
If we conclude that the creative mind is in fact the very grain of the spiritual universe, we cannot arbitrarily stop our investigations with the man who happens to work in stone, or paint, or music, or letters. We shall have to ask ourselves whether the same pattern is not also exhibited in the spiritual structure of every man and woman. And, if it is, whether, by confining the average man and woman to uncreative activities and an uncreative outlook, we are not doing violence to the very structure of our being.
Sayers thus leads us into one of the most important discussions of our time—the question of the rationality of our beliefs, whether these are religious, moral, political, or secular. For Sayers, Christianity was a discovery of the way things really are, not an invention of the way we would like things to be. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein realized that meaning and happiness arise when we believe that we are thinking and living in accordance with something deeper and greater than ourselves: “In order to live happily I must be in agreement with the world. And that is what ‘being happy’ means.” We need to grasp the “big picture” of the universe and position ourselves within it.
Yet we seem unable to grasp this full picture by ourselves. We need help if we are to see beyond the tantalizing limits imposed on us by being human. This is, of course, a classic theme in Christian theology. The notion of divine revelation is about the disclosure of a view of reality that we did not invent and that lies beyond the capacity of human reason to grasp fully. Revelation is not about the violation of human reason, but a demonstration of its limits and a disclosure of what lies tantalizingly beyond its limits. It is about the illumination of the landscape of our world, so that we can see things more clearly. For Christians, this capacity to see things as they really are—rather than as they are glimpsed from the surface—is a gracious gift of God. Our eyes need to be opened so that what we once deemed to be an incoherence is recognized as arising out of our inability to see fully and properly.
For Christian writers such as Sayers, religious faith is not a rebellion against reason, but a revolt against the imprisonment of humanity within the cold walls of a rationalist dogmatism. Logic and facts can only “take us so far; then we have to go the rest of the way toward belief.” Human logic may be rationally adequate, but it is also existentially deficient. Faith declares that there is more to life than this. It doesn’t contradict reason but transcends it. It elicits and invites rational consent, but does not compel it. Sadly, some of those who boast that they are “freethinkers” are simply imprisoned by a defunct eighteenth-century rationalism, unaware of the radical changes in our understanding of rationality that have emerged in the last fifty years.
So how does Sayers work out her approach in relation to her Christian faith? How does this play into her vision of Christianity being embraced by and enfolded within the “creative mind”? Sayers argues that we need to appreciate the importance of theology and explore how this affects the ways that we think and behave. She made this point with particular force in her lecture “Creed or Chaos?,” given during the depths of the Second World War. Many were then worried about the threat to traditional moral values posed by the rise of Nazism and the rapid military advance of German armies across Western Europe. Sayers argued that moral values ultimately reflect a dogma on which they depend for their credibility.
Some British intellectuals of that age, anxious to get rid of Christian ideas but keep its moral framework, had failed to realize that Christian values could not be sustained without the worldview on which they are based. Nazi beliefs gave rise to one set of moral values; Christian beliefs to another. Christian ethics depend on, and are an expression of, the Christian worldview. Sayers ridiculed secularists who were trying “to uphold a particular standard of ethical values which derives from Christian dogma” while at the same time trying to get rid of “the very dogma which is the sole rational foundation for those values.” In the end, Sayers thus declared, this real battle was not about moral values but the worldviews on which those values were based. Safeguarding Christian distinctiveness is the essential precondition for safeguarding Christian values.
For Sayers, the creeds set out Christianity’s distinct vision of reality and remind Christians that, in the end, their lives and thoughts are shaped by this view. Without a creed, there would be moral chaos. A “doctrineless” Christianity is simply impossible, in that Christians need to think about the nature of their faith and its implications for the way they live. Sayers proved capable of summarizing some core Christian doctrines in surprisingly pithy and creative ways—such as her succinct account of the relevance of the doctrine of the incarnation: “If Christ was only a man, then he is entirely irrelevant to any thought about God; if he is only God, then he is entirely irrelevant to any experience of human life.” Yet, for many, her most interesting theological reflections concern the doctrine of the Trinity.
In The Mind of the Maker, Sayers explores some aspects of the doctrine of the Trinity by appealing to the “pattern of the creative mind.” Her experience as an author, Sayers declared, suggested that there are three distinct stages in the process of creative activity that underlies the writing of a book: the idea itself, its implementation, and the process of interaction with its readers. A book comes into existence initially as an ideal construct, built outside time and space but complete in the mind of the author. It is then realized in time and space, by pen, ink, and paper. The creation is only complete, however, when someone reads the book, thus interacting with the mind of its maker and being transformed by the author’s vision.
The mind of the author thus leads initially to the act of writing, then the experience of reading and comprehending the story—but the process is only complete when the author’s idea has entered into a reader’s mind. There is a natural progression in what Sayers terms “Book as Thought,” “Book as Written,” and “Book as Read.” Sayers here identifies an explicit link between God’s self-communication and the doctrine of the Trinity. God is the source of revelation, but that revelation takes place in a specific historical form and, thus, needs to be understood and interpreted by human thinkers.
Sayers’s emphasis on our need to think about God is linked with her cautionary affirmation that human reason is simply not capable of a total comprehension of God. God will always prove resistant to human rationalization, precisely because the human mind cannot fully grasp the vastness of the divine. Sayers makes this important theological point using an analogy familiar to many of her readers. Trying to get God into a verbal formula is like trying to force a large and irritated cat into a small basket. As soon as you tuck in his head, his tail comes out. Once his back paws are inside, the front paws appear again. Even when you finally manage to squeeze the cat into the basket, his “dismal wailings” make it clear that “some essential dignity in the creature has been violated and a wrong done to its nature.”
Now Sayers’s analogy is inadequate in many respects, but it nevertheless makes an important point: the inability of any human conceptual scheme to contain or control the living God. Christian theology has long recognized that it is impossible for us to represent or describe God adequately using human language. The sheer vastness of God causes human images and words to falter, if not break down completely, as they try to depict God fully and faithfully. That’s why the theological notion of “mystery” is so important. A mystery is not something that is contradicted by reason but, rather, something that exceeds reason’s capacity to discern and describe—thus transcending, rather than contradicting, reason. Sayers’s analogy of the protesting captive cat reminds us that we must resist our natural human tendency to limit reality to what we can understand and, instead, open up our minds to a reality that is greater than our capacity to comprehend it. As the great Puritan writer Richard Baxter once remarked, we may well know God, but to comprehend God lies beyond our capacity.
It is a fitting thought with which to end. Christian discipleship is not about mastering God, but being mastered by God—not as an act of craven intellectual submission to someone we fear, but as an act of joyful intellectual enrichment arising from the expansion of our rational and imaginative capacities in response to a captivating vision of God, which ends up setting us free. Perhaps it is fitting to end with a famous prayer often attributed to Augustine of Hippo that weaves these themes together so elegantly:
Eternal God, you are the light of the minds who know you, the life of the souls who love you, and the strength of the souls who serve you. Help us to know you that we may truly love you, so to love you that we may fully serve you, whose service is perfect freedom.
Based on a public lecture given at Gresham College, London, on November 29, 2016.