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By Root 2127 0

with the false type of consciousness, particularly its second form: what we have called the overdevelopment of the cognitive attitude, and the cult of cognition as a self-contained process. The category of the intellectually interesting takes precedence over the category of truth. The protean vastness of untruth, the maze of arbitrary and extravagant but witty errors and sophistries are considered with great interest—if only because they divert the intellect from platitude and simplicity. The mere fact of their complexity (and often enough, of their abstruseness) confers on these errors—in the eyes of such people—a claim to be taken seriously, indeed, even a glamor outshining the simple dignity of plain truth.

Obviously the realm of concepts in which these minds roam about is a highly complicated and disharmonious world, for the possibilities of error are innumerable, whereas truth is one.

Those infatuated with complexity also enjoy the involved aspects of their own psychic life; more, they purposely complicate it by the reflective attention they pay to their feeling or impulse, no matter whether in the given case there is any legitimate need for self-observation. A person of this type takes pleasure in his emotional detours and blind-alleys which provide him with a sense of being deep and interesting. Jacobsen, the Danish novelist, has succeeded in presenting such states of mind (from which he was not free himself) in a remarkably plastic way; Dostoyevsky has depicted them with superior mastery.

This perverted spirituality hides an inherent impotence to penetrate the world of being, directly and essentially. The mind that wallows in complexity is unable to grasp the logos of what is in a straightforward way, to establish a vital contact therewith. It rambles around objects, without ever communicating with them intimately; its ideas are not inspired by the logos of the reality in question and are therefore devoid of intrinsic necessity. A sterile missing of the mark is the invariable fate of such minds: they are forever a prey to the infinitude of possibilities instead of coming close to the one reality. All intoxication with complexity betrays the hunger of those who feed on stones in place of bread.

Simplicity of primitivity vs. simplicity of inner unity

Before, however, we turn to the subject of true Christian simplicity, the antithesis to all forms of disunity and complexity, we must first treat of a certain type of simplicity which is scarcely less remote from true simplicity than are the attitudes we have just been discussing.

The cosmos of beings reveals a vast hierarchy of degrees in regard to their contents of meaning. In the sphere of lifeless matter, a comparative poverty of meaning seems to predominate. Lifeless matter presents a certain simplicity in the sense of a low measure of metaphysical perfection and depth of meaning—shown by the supremacy, in this province, of mechanical patterns of happening. Everywhere in matter we find a mere contiguity and combination of things rather than creative interpenetration. This sphere, too, is destined to represent symbolically the metaphysical abundance of God; but to fulfill that function it needs the category of quantity, both in the sense of a multiplicity of single units and in the sense of extensive manifoldness. A single material thing taken as such represents the wealth of being, proper to the material sphere as a whole, in a fragmentary and indirect manner only.

It is different with the sphere of organic life. In any single organism much more is “said,” as it were, than in a piece of lifeless matter; at the same time, it manifests afar greater simplicity in that it is all subordinated to one principle. The various component functions in an organism are not merely contiguous to, and combined with, one another; they are coupled together in a kind of mutual interpenetration. All single aspects are united and ruled by a basic principle, as is never the case with any unit or accumulation of lifeless matter. Over and above mere contiguity and multiplicity, there