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In describing people of primitive minds as simple, we refer to their inner poverty and their incapacity to respond to the depth and the qualitative manifoldness of the cosmos.

The attention of such people may be monopolized by elementary concerns, poor in meaning: for instance, the external necessities of life. Thus, a peasant’s thoughts and worries will sometimes be strictly confined to his chattel and his parcel of land. His life is deployed within the boundaries of a low sphere, impoverished in meaning and devoid of spirituality; in fact, a small section of that sphere, his household economy, may swallow up his life.

Moreover, that tiny microcosm itself may bear no interest for him except from certain pragmatically restricted points of view. He is hardly interested in a domestic animal as a living being, in the deep mystery embodied in a living organism as such. With all that he has no concern: he is absorbed by concerns of economic usefulness, The same applies to the objects of his agricultural activities.

Thus, his world is a shrunken one, both in depth and width, and his conception of the world is simple in the sense of lacking content and differentiation. It is uncomplicated; but that freedom from complication is obtained at the cost of a renunciation of metaphysical depth and abundance. Frequently, again, his inner life will reflect that conception of the world. In such a case, he will be simple in the sense of being coarse. A few primitive motifs, always the same, occupy his mental scene in a monotonous rhythm. This type of simplicity, no less than the aberration we have labeled complexity, forms an antithesis to the true Christian simplicity which is always joined to spirituality and depth of meaning.

Stupidity is not spiritual simplicity

Or again, we may call a person simple because he is so poorly equipped intellectually as to be incapable of understanding things of any notable degree of spiritual depth or structural differentiation. As soon as he turns his mind to any higher sphere or even to the manifoldness of contents proper to a more trivial sphere, he seems to lose all faculty of comprehension: everything perplexes him. His mind is only able to grasp quite simple situations or relations, that is to say, such as enclose a very modest content of meaning. His mind is marred by a similar incapacity with regard to values. The motivation of his behavior is equally primitive and undifferentiated, Every task requiring a somewhat deeper insight or more careful discrimination will baffle him. His intellectual deficiency renders him awkward; his clumsy hands are unable, so to speak, to touch anything complicated, differentiated, or refined, without crushing it. His life will rarely be tainted with morbid complexity but that danger is prevented at the expense of depth and wealth of meaning. This organic primitivity again has nothing to do with true simplicity.

There are, furthermore, people whom we call simple owing to their habit of an illegitimate simplification of all things. Here again we must distinguish two varieties.

Reductionist simplicity of platitude is not spiritual simplicity

First, there are those who interpret the entire cosmos after the pattern of its lowest sphere. Without considering the specific logos of the object they are faced with, they apply the categories of mechanism to the province of organic life and even to the realm of spiritual personality and culture. Far from attuning themselves to the element of reality that confronts them or attempting to plumb its depth, they drag down everything into the sphere in which they feel themselves at home. Facility is their watchword; and their complacent pride impels them to treat all things in a cavalier fashion. This type of person is not awkward or clumsy but completely uninitiated. A great many popular philosophies are marked with this shallow simplicity.

But the latter is by no means confined to the theoretical domain of popular philosophizing. There are people thus addicted to illegitimate simplification