Trinitarian Creativity: Creation, Self and Originality

Thanks for a great post, Jim. It made me think of something Lewis wrote in a 1939 article on ‘Christianity and Literature’, on creativity and also in a trinitarian context. Lewis is reacting to certain understandings of art for art’s sake (I believe), of setting up aesthetics as a religion where man’s ‘creative genius’ is worshipped, and where a transcendence and spirituality are available as a replacement to those earlier found in traditional religion (now thought impossible or at least discredited in the ‘modern’ world science had ushered in by the early twentieth century–I am also thinking of Clive Bell here), and the new style of poetry practiced by T. S. Eliot and others, which seemed to prize most highly the personal consciousness of the poet as expressed in his verse (free verse being the vogue, throwing off the restrictive chains imposed in the past by style, form, etc.). In other words, a spirit akin to the cult of the new and individual, to relate it to Sarah Schumacher’s prior post to which you also refer. So, onto Lewis’s point, and then if you may, I would love to hear your response. Lewis wrote, beginning with the action of the Incarnate divine Son in response to the Father:

There ([John] 5:19) we are told that the Son does only what He sees the Father doing. He watches the Father’s operations and does the same (ὁμοίως ποιεῖ) or ‘copies’. The Father, because of His love for the Son, shows Him all that He does. I have already explained that I am not a theologian. What aspect of the Trinitarian reality Our Lord, as God, saw while He spoke these words, I do not venture to define; but I think we have a right and even a duty to notice carefully the earthly image by which He expressed it—to see clearly the picture He puts before us. It is a picture of a boy learning to do things by watching a man at work. I think we may even guess what memory, humanly speaking, was in His mind. It is hard not to imagine that He remembered His boyhood, that He saw Himself as a boy in a carpenter’s shop, a boy learning how to do things by watching while St Joseph did them. So taken, the passage does not seem [end of p. 7] to me to conflict with anything I have learned from the creeds, but greatly to enrich my conception of the Divine sonship.
Now it may be that there is no absolute logical contradiction between the passages I have quoted and the assumptions of modern criticism: but I think there is so great a difference of temper that a man whose mind was at one with the mind of the New Testament would not, and indeed could not, fall into the language which most critics now adopt. In the New Testament the art of life itself is an art of imitation: can we, believing this, believe that literature, which must derive from real life, is to aim at being ‘creative’, ‘original’, and ‘spontaneous’. ‘Originality’ in the New Testament is quite plainly the prerogative of God alone; even within the triune being of God it seems to be confined to the Father. The duty and happiness of every other being is placed in being derivative, in reflecting like a mirror. Nothing could be more foreign to the tone of scripture than the language of those who describe a saint as a ‘moral genius’ or a ‘spiritual genius’ thus insinuating that his virtue or spirituality is ‘creative’ or ‘original’. If I have read the New Testament aright, it leaves no room for ‘creativeness’ even in a modified or metaphorical sense. Our whole destiny seems to lie in the opposite direction, in being as little as possible ourselves, in acquiring a fragrance that is not our own but borrowed, in becoming clean mirrors filled with the image of a face that is not ours. I am not here supporting the doctrine of total depravity, and I do not say that the New Testament supports it; I am saying only that the highest good of a creature must be creaturely—that is, derivative or reflective—good. In other words, as St Augustine makes plain (De Civ. Dei xii, ch. I), pride does not only go before a fall but is a fall—a fall of the creature’s attention from what is better, God, to what is worse, itself.

Applying this principle to literature, in its greatest generality, we should get as the basis of all critical theory the maxim that an author should never conceive himself as bringing into existence beauty or wisdom which did not exist before, but simply and solely as trying to embody in terms of his own art some reflection of eternal Beauty and Wisdom. Our criticism would therefore from the beginning group itself with some existing theories of poetry against others. It would have affinities with the primitive or Homeric theory in which the poet is the mere pensioner of the Muse. It would have affinities with the Platonic doctrine of a transcendent Form partly imitable on earth; and remoter affinities with the Aristotelian doctrine of μῑμησις and the Augustan doctrine about the imitation of Nature and the Ancients. It would be opposed to the theory of genius as, perhaps, generally understood; and above all it would be opposed to the idea that literature is self-expression. (7-8)