"Not only was the Teacher wise, but also he imparted knowledge to the people. He pondered and searched out and set in order many proverbs. The Teacher searched to find just the right words, and what he wrote was upright and true."
-Ecclesiastes 12:9-10
There is immense spiritual importance in "finding just the right words" to express life-transforming wisdom. If wisdom touches the soul of a person, and the soul of a person is touched by art, then beautified verbal artistry can touch the soul in ways that scientific and technical verbiage cannot. A computer will never be able to construct beautiful and wise sayings phrased with soul-sourced aesthetic eloquence. There will always be Smartphones. There will never be Wisephones.
An excerpt from a footnote from my Old Testament professor's book Old Testament Theology: Divine Call and Human Response really hits home on this point:
"Israel's wisdom traditions viewed aesthetic concerns as extremely important.... Along with the aesthetics of practical organization noted in 1 Kgs 10:4-5, wisdom prized artistry of expression (see Eccl 12:9-10). Wisdom, in part, consisted of the ability to match wise content with forms of expression that themselves displayed wisdom. The sages communicated their wisdom with rhetorical and aesthetic power so as to move the receptive hearer closer to the ideals they wished to communicate. For example, Wisdom literature typically exhibits a fascinating use of words and sounds and creative use of language, much of which, unfortunately, is lost in translation. it frequently uses rhyming, assonance, and word play... Similarly, several texts are written as alphabetic or acrostic poems, i.e., poems in which each line begins with a letter of the alphabet, in consecutive order (Prov 2; 31:10-31). Wisdom also uses numerical sayings... a wide variety of figures of speech, and most especially powerful and creative metaphors. Sometimes these metaphors are sufficiently imprecise so as to provoke creative thought (e.g., "The fear of the LORD is a fountain of life," Prov 14:27). At other times they may be profoundly sensory and visceral (e.g., Prov. 10:26: "As vinegar to the teeth, and as smoke to the eyes, / So is the sluggard to them that send him")."
-John Kessler
Thank God for modern day Solomons like C.S. Lewis, who can use careful, thoughtful, and aesthetic word choice to beautifully paint spiritual Mona Lisas of wisdom in people's imaginations.
"In speaking of this desire for our own far off country, which we find in ourselves even now, I feel a certain shyness. I am almost committing an indecency. I am trying to rip open the consolable secret in each one of you - the secret which hurts so much that you take your revenge on it by calling it names like Nostalgia and Romanticism and Adolescence; the secret which also pierces with such sweetness that when, in very intimate conversation, the mention of it becomes imminent, we grow awkward and affect to laugh at ourselves; the secret we cannot hide and cannot tell, though we desire to do both. We cannot tell it because it is a desire for something that has never actually appeared in our experience. We cannot hide it because our experience is constantly suggesting it, and we betray ourselves like lovers at the mention of a name. Our commonest expedient is to call it beauty and behave as if that had settled the matter. Wordsworth's expedient was to identify it with certain moments in his own past. But all this is a cheat. If Wordworth had gone back to those moments of the past, he would not have found the thing itself, but only the reminder of it; what he remembered would turn out to be itself a remembering. The book or music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing. These things - the beauty, the memory of our own past - are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshipers. For they are not thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of at tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited."
-C.S. Lewis
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