Category Archives: Quotes

Before All Things Else

What distinguishes [the artist] here from the man who works to live is, I think, his desire to see the fulfilment of the work. Whether it is possible for a machine-worker to feel creatively about his routine job I do not know; but I suspect that it is, provided and so long as the worker eagerly desires that before all things else the work shall be done. What else causes the armaments worker to labour passionately when he knows that the existence of his country is threatened, but that his heart travels along the endless band with the machine parts and that his imagination beholds the fulfilment of the work in terms, not of money, but of the blazing gun itself, charged with his love and fear. As the author of Ecclesiasticus says, he “watches to finish the work”; for once, that is, he sees the end-product of his toil exactly as the artist always sees it, in a vision of Idea, Energy, and Power. It is unfortunate that so little effort should be made by Church or State to show him the works of peace in the same terms. Is the man, for example, engaged in the mass-production of lavatory cisterns encouraged to bring to his daily monotonous toil the vision splendid of an increasingly hygienic world? I doubt it; yet there is much merit in sanitary plumbing—more, if you come to think of it, than there is in warfare.

Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

Work by the Standard of Eternity

That the eyes of all workers should behold the integrity of the work is the sole means to make that work good in itself and so good for mankind. This is only another way of saying that the work must be measured by the standard of eternity; or that it must be done for God first and foremost; or that the Energy must faithfully manifest forth the Idea; or, theologically, that the Son does the will of the Father.

Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

Those With Ears to Hear

A passing hostile comment in the second-century pagan critic Celsus shows that the chants used in Christian worship (which he seems to have heard) were not only unusual to his pagan ears but so beautiful that he actually resented their emotive effect as an instrument for dulling the critical faculty.

Henry Chadwick, The Early Church

The Maturity of the Church

It is a paradoxical law of early liturgical study that the greater the biblical element in any given prayer the less primitive it is likely to be.

Henry Chadwick, The Early Church

On Trinitarian Art

If the creative artists had been called in to give evidence about the filioque clause, they must have come down heavily on the Western side of the controversy, since their experience leaves them in no doubt about the procession of the ghost from the son.

Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

Frustrated

The Devil is the most discontented creature in the world. He is the proudest creature there is, and the most discontented creature, and the most dejected creature.

Jeremiah Burroughs

Contentment

There are no works that God has made—the sun, moon, stars and all the world—in which so much of the Glory of God appears, as in a man who lives quietly in the midst of adversity.

Jeremiah Burroughs

Only Through Time

We must not, that is, try to behave as though the Fall had never occurred nor yet say that the Fall was a Good Thing in itself. But we may redeem the Fall by a creative act.

That, according to Christian doctrine, is the way that God behaved, and the only way in which we can behave if we want to be “as gods”. The Fall had taken place and Evil had been called into active existence; the only way to transmute Evil into Good was to redeem it by creation. But, the Evil having been experienced, it could only be redeemed within the medium of experience—that is, by an incarnation in which experience was fully and freely in accordance with the Idea.

Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker

Engineering and Liberal Arts

— Everyone gets a double major: engineering and history. That’s it. That’s all we offer. There are some required history survey courses that you take in a sequence, and then a bunch of electives. The capstone is probably a history of technology course, but it comes after and in addition to the macro- and micro-histories you’ve been studying all along. You wouldn’t have to do a bunch of integrated “context and ethics” in a technology course if you just said: Everybody studies these two things, period. There’s no complementary “rounding out” in some vague hand-wavey form. You just don’t get prepared unless you have history, full stop.

— Everyone does a 2 + 1 + 2. Instead of students cycling out from liberal arts colleges to engineering programs for a year, it’s the opposite: You come to engineering school, spin out for a deep immersion in a liberal arts environment, maybe one that also serves as your study abroad, then come back and finish.

— Everyone gets an engineering degree, but the other requirement is a Cultural Life Program, such as the one at Furman. Over four years you attend lectures, concerts, and museum exhibitions, a lot of which are your choosing, but they add up to something like 60 hours of cultural education and a required thesis course.

Sara Hendren, “ways you could remake an engineering school”