True Art

"It has become a commonplace to say that the arts are in a bad way. We are in fact largely given over tot he entertainers and the spellbinders; and because we do not understand that these two functions do not represent the true nature of art, the true artists are, as it were, excommunicate and have no audience. But here there is not, I think, so much a lapse from a Christian esthetic as a failure ever to find and examine a real Christian esthetic based on dogma and not on ethics. This may not be a bad thing. We have at least a new line of country to explore that has not been trampled on and built over and fought over by countless generations of quarrelsome critics. What we have to start from is the Trinitarian doctrine of creative mind and the light that that doctrine throws on the true nature of images.

The great thing, I am sure, is not to be nervous about God - not to try and shut out the Lord Immanuel from any sphere of truth. Art is not he - we must not substitute art for God; yet this also is he for it is one of his images and therefore reveals his nature. Here we see in a mirror darkly - we behold only the images; elsewhere we shall see face to face, in the place where image and reality are one."

-Dorothy Sayers, "Toward a Christian Esthetic," The Whimsical Christian.

Experience and Art

"A poet is a man who not only suffers the impact of external events but also experiences them. He puts the experience into words in his own mind, and in so doing recognizes the experience for what it is. To the extent that we can do that, we are all poets. A poet so-called is simply a man like ourselves with an exceptional power to revealing his experience by expressing it, so that not only he, but we ourselves, recognize that experience as our own."


-Dorothy Sayers, "Toward a Christian Esthetic," The Whimsical Christian.

Toward a Christian Esthetic

"But oddly enough, we have no Christian esthetic - no Christian philosophy of the arts. The Church as a body has never made up her mind about the arts, and it is hardly too much to say that she has never tried. She has, of course, from time to time puritanically denounced the arts as irreligious and mischievous, or tried to exploit the arts as a means to the teaching of religion and morals - but I shall hope to show you that both these attitudes are false and degrading and are founded upon a completely mistaken idea of what art is supposed to be and do. And there have, of course, been plenty of writers on esthetics who happened to be Christians, but they seldom made any consistent attempt to relate their esthetic to the central Christian dogmas. Indeed, so far as European esthetic is concerned, one feels that it would probably have developed along precisely the same lines had there never been an Incarnation to reveal the nature of God - that is to say the nature of all truth. But that is fantastic. If we commit ourselves to saying that the Christian revelation discovers to us the nature of all truth, then it must discover to us the nature of the truth about art among other things."

"It is absurd to go placidly along explaining art in terms of a pagan esthetic and taking no notice whatever of the complete revolution of our ideas about the nature of things that occurred, or should have occurred after the first Pentecost. I will go so far as to maintain that the extraordinary confusion of our minds about the nature and function of art is principally due to the fact that for nearly two thousand years we have been trying to reconcile a pagan, or at any rate a Unitarian, esthetic with a Christian - that is, a Trinitarian and Incarnational - theology. Even that makes us out too intelligent. We have not tried to reconcile them. We have merely allowed them to exist side by side in our minds; and where the conflict between them became too noisy to be overlooked, we have tried to silence the clamor by main force, either by brutally subjugating art to religion, or by shutting them up in separate prison cells and forbidding them to hold any communication with each other."


-Dorothy Sayers, "Toward a Christian Esthetic," The Whimsical Christian.
Emphasis is mine.