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With reference to before and after, the Moment is and remains strange and different; it neither has its roots in the past, nor can it be transmitted into the future. The Moment does not belong in any causal or temporal or logical sequence: it is always and everywhere wholly new: it is what God — who is only immortal — is and has and does.

— The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth (Page 112)

True religion is a seal, reminding men that they have been established by God and that they will be established by Him; it reminds them also of their dissolution and their redemption, and of the daily renewed faithfulness of God. As a seal, it points onwards to the covenant between God and man, which still remains unfulfilled, and which still awaits its inauguration. The signing of a contract must not be confused with the decision which preceded it or the execution which will follow it. Similarly the decision of God eternally precedes the sign, and the purpose of God eternally stretches beyond it.

— The Epistle to the Romans by Karl Barth (Page 130)

What can you do about it?’ We are asked not to say ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ or ‘I will’ or ‘I will not’, but to be inventive, to create, to discover something new. The difference between ordinary people and saints is not that saints fulfil the plain duties which ordinary men neglect. The things saints do have not usually occurred to ordinary people at all… ‘Gracious’ conduct is somehow like the work of an artist. It needs imagination and spontaneity. It is not a choice between presented alternatives but the creation of something new. (A. D. Lindsay: The Two Moralities.)

— The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers

But if we do—if we conclude that 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.

— The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers

That no human maker can create a self-conscious being, we have already seen; and seen also that he is always urged by an inward hankering to do so, finding approximate satisfactions for this desire in procreation, in such relations as those of a playwright with his actors, and in the creation of imaginary characters. In all these relations, he is conscious of the same paradoxical need—namely, the complete independence of the creature combined with its willing co-operation in his purpose in conformity with the law of its nature. In this insistent need he sees the image of the perfect relation of Creator and creature, and the perfect reconciliation of divine predestination with free created will.

In the creature also, he recognises a division and a paradox. He is aware at once of its insistent urge to become manifest, and also, at the same time, a resistance to creation and a tendency to fall back into the randomness of negation. It is this resistance that Berdyaev calls the “dark meonic freedom”—the impulse to chaos. It is bound up with the natural law of matter, which is a law of increasing randomness as time goes on.

— The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers

It will be seen that, although the writer’s love is verily a jealous love, it is a jealousy for and not of his creatures. He will tolerate no interference either with them or between them and himself. But he does not desire that the creature’s identity should be merged in his own, nor that his miraculous power should be invoked to wrest the creature from its proper nature.

— The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers

The whole of existence is held to be the work of the Divine Creator—everything that there is, including not only the human maker and his human public, but all other entities “visible and invisible” that may exist outside this universe. Consequently, whereas the human writer obtains his response from other minds, outside and independent of his own, God’s response comes only from His own creatures. This is as though a book were written to be read by the characters within it. And further: the universe is not a finished work. Every mind within it is in the position of the audience sitting in the stalls and seeing the play for the first time. Or rather, every one of us is on the stage, performing a part in a play, of which we have not seen either the script or any synopsis of the ensuing acts.

— The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers

For this reason, no considerations of false reverence should prevent us from subjecting the incarnations of creators to the severest tests of examination. It is right that they should be pulled about and subjected to the most searching kind of inquiry. If the structure is truly knit, it will stand any strain, and prove its truth by its toughness. Pious worshippers, whether of mortal or immortal artists, do their deities little honour by treating their incarnations as something too sacred for rough handling; they only succeed in betraying a fear lest the structure should prove flimsy or false. But the writing of autobiography is a dangerous business; it is a mark either of great insensitiveness to danger or of an almost supernatural courage. Nobody but a god can pass unscathed through the searching ordeal of incarnation.

— The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers

He will not, any more than a good writer, convert His characters without preparing the way for their conversion, and His interferences with space-time will be conditioned by some kind of relationship of power between will and matter. Faith is the condition for the removal of mountains; Lear is converted but not Iago. Consequences cannot be separated from their causes without a loss of power; and we may ask ourselves how much power would be left in the story of the crucifixion, as a story, if Christ had come down from the cross. That would have been an irrelevant miracle, whereas the story of the resurrection is relevant, leaving the consequences of action and character still in logical connection with their causes. It is, in fact, an outstanding example of the development we have already considered—the leading of the story back, by the new and more powerful way of grace, to the issue demanded by the way of judgment, so that the law of nature is not destroyed but fulfilled.

— The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers

If we by analogy call God “the Creator” we are thereby admitting that it is possible for Him to work miracles; but if we examine more closely the implications of our analogy, we may be driven to ask ourselves how far it is really desirable that He should do anything of the kind. For the example of the writers who indulge in miracle is not altogether encouraging. “Poetic justice” (the name often given to artistic miracle-mongering) may be comforting, but we regretfully recognise that it is very bad art.

— The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers

The business of the creator is not to escape from his material medium or to bully it, but to serve it; but to serve it he must love it. If he does so, he will realise that its service is perfect freedom. This is true, not only of all literary art but of all creative art; I have chosen a theatrical example, merely because there, as also in the creation of characters, failure to surrender to the law of kind produces disasters more patent and immediate than elsewhere.

— The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers

The vital power of an imaginative work demands a diversity within its unity; and the stronger the diversity, the more massive the unity. Incidentally, this is the weakness of most “edifying” or “propaganda” literature. There is no diversity. The Energy is active only in one part of the whole, and in consequence the wholeness is destroyed and the Power diminished. You cannot, in fact, give God His due without giving the devil his due also.

— The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers

The “creation” is not a product of the matter, and is not simply a rearrangement of the matter. The amount of matter in the universe is limited, and its possible rearrangements, though the sum of them would amount to astronomical figures, is also limited. But no such limitation of numbers applies to the creation of works of art. The poet is not obliged, as it were, to destroy the material of a Hamlet in order to create a Falstaff, as a carpenter must destroy a tree-form to create a table-form. The components of the material world are fixed; those of the world of imagination increase by a continuous and irreversible process, without any destruction or rearrangement of what went before. This represents the nearest approach we experience to “creation out of nothing”, and we conceive of the act of absolute creation as being an act analogous to that of the creative artist.

— The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers

The fact is, that all language about everything is analogical; we think in a series of metaphors. We can explain nothing in terms of itself, but only in terms of other things. Even mathematics can express itself in terms of itself only so long as it deals with an ideal system of pure numbers; the moment it begins to deal with numbers of things it is forced back into the language of analogy. In particular, when we speak about something of which we have no direct experience, we must think by analogy or refrain from thought. It may be perilous, as it must be inadequate, to interpret God by analogy with ourselves, but we are compelled to do so; we have no other means of interpreting anything.

— The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers

The proper question to be asked about any creed is not, “Is it pleasant?” but, “is it true?”... It is unpleasant to be called sinners, and much nicer to think that we all have hearts of gold—but have we? It is agreeable to suppose that the more scientific knowledge we acquire the happier we shall be but does it look like it? It is encouraging to feel that progress is making us automatically every day and in every way better and better and better—but does history support that view?

— The Mind of the Maker by Dorothy L. Sayers