Contemplate the Beautiful and Let It Draw You to the Good

I recently revisited here David Bentley Hart's essay "A Sense of Style: Beauty and the Christian Moral Life," where Hart seeks to conflate the ethical with the beautiful. Hart's argument, you'll recall, is that the beautiful draws us to the good, for the simple reason that God is the Good and the Beautiful. 

Hart writes: 

It may seem somewhat perverse, as I have noted, to suggest that the ethical should in this sense be ultimately reducible to the aesthetic; but it should be, even so, for the simple reason that what draws us to the good is that it is also eternal beauty. God himself is beauty, that is, and in the end, for Christians, we are joined to him in seeking the beautiful as he has taught us to recognize it in Christ...

This joining of the moral with the aesthetic may seem odd to us modern people. But it wasn't prior to the Enlightenment. Before the modern era, virtue ethics, rooted in Aristotle and the New Testament, held sway. And the Greek word for virtue--areté--often translated as "excellence" was as much aesthetical as it was moral. Virtuous living was artful, beautiful living. 

You see this conflation of the good and the beautiful in Paul's only use of the word areté, from Philippians 4.8: 

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence [areté] if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

Notice the aesthetical focus of Paul's moral exhortation here. Contemplate the beautiful and let it draw you toward the good.