Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [38]
How immensely much is said in a single human being! How much is contained in a being that possesses consciousness and is pervaded by the light of reason, that is endowed with a capacity for love and for knowledge, that is free, and a bearer of moral values; a being which, in contradistinction to all others, is not merely a vestige but an image of God. All multiplicity and grandeur of the material realm, the quantitative vastness of the material cosmos, the immense variety of the objects composing it, the solar systems, even the ineffable manifoldness of living things, fail to represent God in so high a sense as does a single spiritual person.
In the degree in which a thing represents God, by so much does it participate in the divine abundance of being, and so much greater is also the significance of a single unit thereof. In the spiritual person, the principle of mutual interpenetration is far more predominant even than in the living organism as such. And, while the spiritual person has far more substantiality and depth than has the living organism, let alone lifeless matter, by the same token it also possesses much more simplicity. Here, the category of quantity decreases in meaning and is no longer applicable in exactly the same sense. For personal essence is not resolvable into isolated, extensive, measurable, and mechanical components or aspects. Metaphysically speaking, the higher an entity is, the greater its simplicity. The soul is so simple as no longer to admit of a disjunction of form and matter.
Simplicity, thus interpreted, is not akin but antithetical to primitivity and poverty of meaning. The simplicity of an entity increases with its height: it implies, as it were, the expression of a great meaning in one word, the condensation of a great wealth of being in one individual, in one quality, in one act or manifestation.
This character of simplicity (in the sense of a condensation of being) grows along the ascending hierarchy of the cosmos until it culminates in the one eternal Word of God, in quo est omnis plenitudo divinitatis (“in whom is all plenitude of divinity”) that illumines the face of Christ. The absolute simplicity of God precludes the distinction, not only between form and matter but between existence and essence, between actus and potentia. Yet, God is the infinite plenitude of being.
Simplicity of cognition: science compared to philosophy as a form of knowledge
In regard to the modes of cognition, too, we may visualize the increase of simplicity in proportion to the degree of height. Thus, philosophical cognition, intent on grasping the essence of things (intima rei intus legere), is in a fundamental sense simpler than scientific cognition, whose methods, of observation and deduction are linked to an outward approach to the object.
The natural sciences depend on quantity, on an extensive accumulation of data by means of repeated experiments; the knowledge they procure covers its field in breadth. Philosophy, on the contrary, is not essentially dependent on the multitude of single observations, as it may in principle seize the essence of the object by means of one relevant example; nor is it intent on elaborating a knowledge in breadth.
The dimension in which it seeks to unfold is that of depth; moreover, it aims to comprehend the unity of the entire cosmos, and its crowning act is an advance to the ultimate principle of being: being infinite and absolutely simple, in which all abundance of being is contained per eminentiam.
Inner spiritual poverty is not true spiritual simplicity
Analogously to this cosmic hierarchy in reference to the inner plenitude of being, and according to the two opposite kinds of simplicity in general—the simplicity of primitivity and crudity on the one hand, the metaphysical simplicity of inward unity on the other—we also must distinguish between two extremely