The Lovely and Where it Leads
By Mark Valeri
In Philippians 4:8 Paul sets aside the Hebrew scriptures, his usual source, and reaches for the books (scrolls?) of pagan moral teaching to find the right words, many of them used nowhere else in the New Testament. “Lovely”—in the Greek, “prosphilēs”—stands out in this regard. Philologists tell us that it comes from two words: pros (at or in the presence of) and phileō (love as admiration and affection). It means agreeable, evoking affection or love: lovely in the sense of something that pleases, such as beauty. The word was featured in ancient Epicureanism, a philosophical school centered on human companionship, high-minded pleasure, and good taste (here we can detect the modern notions of an epicure as someone with refined tastes, especially for food).
The word is often misunderstood. A few years ago, a couple—pushing the upper limits of middle-age, I would say—joined a Sunday-School class I was teaching, on Isaiah. One Sunday, the woman made what I thought was an especially helpful comment: insightful, sensitive, and phrased beautifully. I responded with “oh, that’s lovely.” Her face went blank. I received an email later that day, from her displeased husband, informing me that my comment had wounded her. The word “lovely,” they thought, was dismissive: lovely, to them, meant merely pretty or cute, not serious. We got things straightened out.
We ought, Paul says, dwell on things that are lovely—meaning beautiful and pleasing, not just pretty or cute—because such qualities draw us out of our self-centered, narrow concerns. The colonial American theologian Jonathan Edwards (about whom I write a good deal in my work as a historian of American religion) explained that beauty is actually a crucial moral quality. It reflects purpose, order, and meaning—the last term of which implied a sense of belonging to all of humanity, indeed, to the cosmos. In that sense, loveliness is appealing because it mirrors an affirmation of life (Edwards said “being”) itself. This was an especially eighteenth-century notion of beauty—an early foray into what we now call aesthetics or the study of beauty. Edwards built such aesthetic theories into the very basis of his moral philosophy. The affections that loveliness evokes—such as joy, wonder, and appreciation for the “other”—are the same affections that we often experience in our relationships with others. We cannot separate what is lovely from what is good.
I rarely ponder “loveliness” around me—and the preachers and teachers to whom I listen almost studiously avoid the concept. That says more about our theological lapses than the worth of the term. On occasion, a few moments before a Mark Rothko or Mako Fujimura painting, or a few minutes spent listening to an Arvo Pärt piece, can turn me in the right direction. More viscerally, perhaps, I recall one experience when I was overcome with a sense of lovely things in nature. I was walking during a night in the woods of Vermont when a windstorm came in. The feel and sound of the wind-whipped trees in the darkness took my breath away. It was beautiful. I felt a small part of a large and powerful universe. I sensed the presence of God. I had joy.
The twentieth-century Swiss Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar teaches us that the divine glory spoken of in the Bible—the very character of God that sets God apart from every created being—is a type of beauty. The word sublime fits the picture. To contemplate things that are lovely, in other words, leads us to the One who is the source of all beauty. Paul asks us to ponder “whatever is lovely” because loveliness leads us to God.
Mark Valeri is Reverend Priscilla Wood Neaves Distinguished Professor of Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis and a Carver Project Faculty Fellow.