Per Caritatem

In chapter 4 of N.T. Wright’s book, Simply Christian, he presents a wonderful illustration of the incomplete beauty that we encounter in our world in its present state.  He describes a collector who was rummaging through an attic in a small Austrian town and happened to come across what seemed to be an unknown score of Mozart.  Elated, the collector informed his friends and soon someone was sitting at a piano and attempting to play the piece.  As it turns out, the work was indeed Mozart, however, there were numerous places that were left blank and some that were impossible to make out.  What they had found was simply one part (the piano part) to a larger work.  “What they are looking at is indeed by Mozart.  It is indeed beautiful.  But it’s the piano part of a piece that involves another instrument, or perhaps other instruments.  By itself it is frustratingly incomplete.  A further search of the attic reveals nothing else that would provide a clue.  The piano music is all there is, a signpost to something that was there once and might still turn up one day.  [...] This is the position we are in when confronted by beauty.  The world is full of beauty, but the beauty is incomplete.  Our puzzlement about what beauty is, what it means, and what (if anything) it is there for is the inevitable result of looking at one part of a larger whole.  Beauty, in other words, is another echo of a voice-a voice which (from the evidence before us) might be saying one of several different things, but which, were we to hear it in all its fullness, would make sense of what we presently see and hear and know and love and call ‘beautiful.’” (p. 40).

I find it interesting that in I.vi.1 of the Institutes, Calvin, after having spent several paragraphs discussing the ways in which the creation proclaims the knowledge of God, then states that something further is needed so that we might read the “text” of creation aright.

For as the aged, or those whose sight is defective, when any books however fair, is set before them, though they perceive that there is something written are scarcely able to make out two consecutive words, but, when aided by glasses, begin to read distinctly, so Scripture, gathering together the impressions of Deity, which, till then, lay confused in our minds, dissipates the darkness, and shows us the true God clearly. God therefore bestows a gift of singular value, when, for the instruction of the Church, he [...] opens his own sacred mouth; when he not only proclaims that some God must be worshipped, but at the same time declares that He is the God to whom worship is due; when he not only teaches his elect to have respect to God, but manifests himself as the God to whom this respect should be paid.

The course which God followed towards his Church from the very first, was to supplement these common proofs [which Calvin discussed in a previous section] by the addition of his Word, as a surer and more direct means of discovering himself. And there can be no doubt that it was by this help, Adam, Noah, Abraham, and the other patriarchs, attained to that familiar knowledge which, in a manner, distinguished them from unbelievers. I am not now speaking of the peculiar doctrines of faith by which they were elevated to the hope of eternal blessedness. It was necessary, in passing from death unto life, that they should know God, not only as a Creator, but as a Redeemer also; and both kinds of knowledge they certainly did obtain from the Word. In point of order, however, the knowledge first given was that which made them acquainted with the God by whom the world was made and is governed. To this first knowledge was afterwards added the more intimate knowledge which alone quickens dead souls, and by which God is known not only as the Creator of the worlds and the sole author and disposer of all events, but also as a Redeemer, in the person of the Mediator.”

It seems to me that Wright’s idea of beauty encountered in the created order as an echo of another voice might be brought into fruitful conversation with what Calvin says in the passage above.  What do you think?