In The Mind of the Maker, Sayers connects the Creation story of Genesis and human creativity and refers to the Holy Trinity as the link through which the two are related. It was her belief that creativity is a genuine part of human nature. Since God is the everlasting Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, all three of these divine entities of the Trinity, in essence, have a place in creation. Using her experience as a creative writer, she establishes the three-part structure of the writing process in order to explain how human creativity functions and then draws a parallel to the three-part structure of the doctrine of the Trinity. Sayers expresses her appreciation for writing and its theological basis in The Mind of the Maker, in which she attempts to understand the doctrine of the Trinity in terms of creativity. Dorothy Sayers in The Mind of the Maker presents an analogical study of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity that compares the various aspects of the Godhead to aspects of human capability.
Illuminating on the Trinity is a noble feat, but for many it is ultimately pointless. Theologians through the centuries have struggled to formulate a doctrinally accurate, fully convincing illustration of the Trinity. However, some may argue that Sayers has been overlooked as providing the most substantial and dependable model for the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. She describes God the Father as “the Creative Idea, passionless, timeless, beholding the whole work complete at once, the end in the beginning” (34); the Son “is the Creative Energy begotten of that idea, and working in time from the beginning to the end, with sweat and passion, being incarnate in the bonds of matter”; and the Holy Spirit “is the Creative Power, the meaning of the work and ts response in the lively soul”. This threefold theological structure paralleled in human creativity is described by Sayers as an intellectual process that allows the individual artist or creator to deduce each part of the creative act despite the act being incapable of material manifestation without the whole of its parts.
However, it seems, that God the father is in the original “Creative Idea”. Every writer has a moment when he or she suddenly has an idea, an inspiration and one knows that the book or work is going to be completed; however, long it takes because of that original idea. And that seems very much like God-the originator of all creation. The nature of Scripture itself confirms the significance of creativity in language. For God revealed Himself through the writings of several authors over the course of hundreds of years. This concept is the kind of creativity Dorothy Sayers had in mind when writing The Mind of the Maker. She considered writing to be a very high level creative act which consists of transforming one’s imagination to give it life by using words as God Himself did at the Creation. Though, God’s words created physical results, in contrast the writer’s chief goal is not the physical book itself, but the ideas it expresses.
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Furthermore, this kind of creativity used to find new language to express the revealed truths about the nature of God did not end with the Scriptures. Over the centuries, many theologians have deliberated over the nature of the various components of the Trinity. The Christian community, as it grew in understanding in the complexity of Church doctrine, engaged their human creativity to discover and develop their expression of divine reality. In creatively exploring the workings of God’s self-revelation, Sayers discovers new depths of meaning in the mysteries of the trinity-meaning not only in the intellectual and philosophical sense, but also meaning in the sense of what God means as a loving entity involved in the everyday lives of humans. In relation to God the Father being the creative idea, Sayers said, it means that the writer can say that “My book is finished -I have only to write it”. The writer has the ability to see the whole thing complete in their subconscious. What is created by the writer is an individual and complete work achieved by three separate parts working in unison. Each part of the trinity can be thought of individually and as working together, as Sayers explains “these three are one, each equally in itself the whole work, whereof none can exist without other”.
In The Mind of the Maker, Sayers uses her own experience as a writer to explain her analogy with the doctrine of the Trinity. Through her experience as a writer of detective novels, she makes arguments for her theory. Sayers uses the process of writing novels as a good example of a creative idea which must first be complete in the writer’s mind. In addition, the creative energy a writer devotes to writing the novel and what is released when the book is read results in the entirety of the writer’s idea becoming obvious not only to their readers but also to the writer. As she believes it to be fact that, in the case of a writer the creation of a book requires the creating of three books, which are at the same time the same book. In closing, Sayers’ set of analogies helps people to better understand the interrelationship of the Triune God, as well as how humans experience of them.
