Being Called Together – Jean-Louis Chrétien and the Ecological Art of Creaturely Vocation

Abstract This essay offers a constructive unfolding of Jean-Louis Chrétien’s claim that the first vocation is the vocation to be. By exploring Chrétien’s phenomenology of call and response, this essay (i) offers an account of creaturely life as a sign of the infinite, non-sequential call and response of the intratinitarian life; (ii) suggests that this linguistic ontology makes possible a normative account of ecology as a conversation (rather than a purely descriptive account of ecology as a system), in which the plenitude of things emerges together; and (iii) argues that creatures inhabit their creaturely vocation by repairing and nurturing the relationship between things, creating something that is greater than the sum of its parts in a way akin to the choreographing of beauty in a work of art.