Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [36]
This is the primal word, which God has called upon mankind to utter. God expects each of us individually, and man as the highest and most lavishly endowed of His creatures, to say this word. It is the constitutive core of consciousness; and it cannot be spoken too clearly, too wakefully, too explicitly. It is, therefore, one of the basic tasks imposed on every Christian to rise to a state of true consciousness, thus infusing an integral meaning into his life. Based on that primal word, life attains great simplicity, and with that word alone can we “live in that great secret of the adoration of God which is Christ.”
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True Simplicity
THE Gospel intends us to attain to true simplicity: simplicity in the sense of an inward unity of life.
Simplicity contrasts with disunity
Such a simplicity contrasts, in the first place, with the disunity in the soul of those whose lives are filled, now by one thing, now by another; who lose themselves in the motley variegation of life, who do not seek for an integration of their actions and conduct by one dominant principle. A similar disunity is manifest in lives controlled by diverse and mutually contradictory currents, which develop side by side, each according to its immanent law, without being coordinated or confronted with the other. A person of this kind is said to be split; his life lacks inward unity. Such a deficiency often occurs in those who also lack consciousness and continuity.
Simplicity contrasts with psychological convolutedness
Secondly, true simplicity is opposed to complexity taken in a specific sense. Certain people are prevented by their various psychic complexes and tensions, from giving a plain response to the logos of a situation. Hence, instead of keeping on the straight road that points to the object, they are always compelled to choose bypaths and detours. Everywhere they come to grips with artificial problems and complications. Their inferiority complex, for instance, makes them feel embarrassed by a complaisance which would rejoice a healthier type of person, or makes them reciprocate it with some objectively incongruous act.
They are deformed by their inhibitions and are continually delayed in their reactions by many unnecessary sentiments. Everything becomes thus over-complicated: a huge amount of time is wasted on the simplest things and the most unequivocal tasks are denatured into portentous problems. Their false way of being conscious, in the sense of an ever-present reflectiveness, is often responsible for such people’s lack of simplicity. They are, as Shakespeare says in Hamlet, “sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”
Simplicity does not mistake complexity for profundity
Or again, a man may develop a predilection for complicating as many things as possible because he mistakes complexity for profundity. This species of complexity, unlike the aforementioned one, is more or less an appanage of the intellectual. Its lover prefers obscurity to clarity; he is liable to credit oracular stammerings with profundity and to dismiss whatever is unequivocally and tersely enounced as trivial. He thus tends to make everything appear more complicated than it really is and consequently falls short of an adequate knowledge of reality.
For such people are blind to the trait of simplicity associated with the metaphysical wealth and height of being; they overlook the metaphysical law that the higher a thing is the simpler it is, in a sense—in the sense of inner unity, as expressed by the dictum, “simplicity is the seal of verity.” They are insensitive to the value of true simplicity.
Simplicity avoids the cult of the abstruse
This kind of complexity, too, is connected