The Call that Lies Behind Beauty

When we hear a call, what calls us? The Greeks answered, "Beauty." The Greek word for Beauty, kalon, has as its root, kalein, to call. This makes sense since the attraction we experience in seeing, or hearing, or touching, a beautiful thing, has a source: the beauty itself that lies within and behind the beautiful object, and calls, attracts us. In effect, the beautiful calls us, and we experience it as attraction.

How do we respond to beauty? By "calling" it the beautiful, giving it a name. We call what called us, thereby making it present as it truly is, acknowledging it as something beautiful. The word "call" has these two senses.

Christians looked behind the call of Beauty, and saw its source, God. Beauty's impersonal voice has as its source a prior "call," the Word of the personal Creator God.

"When instead the origin of the call becomes the Creator God, neutrality vanishes, the origin is the Word himself. The call of self-diffusing beauty refers back to a prior call, a call that is absolute: the call that creates, proclaimed, as it were, in the intimacy of the divine silence."

Jean-Louis Chretien, The Call and the Response, at 16.

"Hence Paul's statement in the Epistle to the Romans (4:17) that God 'calls into being what is not.'" Ibid., 18.

And so, our ability to respond to God's call is given to us as well, and explains why, in Sunday's reading from John, the initiative in our vocation is God's, not our own. Our ability to respond is part of a God's gift to us in creation. What is asked for in God's call to us? To respond in recognition, in love, to God's goodness in creating us, to "name" this goodness and beauty, in essence ethical, in our lives.

Listen to Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor.

Listen to Chopin's Nocturne in D Flat Major (Youri Egorov).

Listen to Chopin's Ballade No. 1 in G Minor (Horowitz).