Transformation in Christ_ On the Christian Attitude - Dietrich Von Hildebrand [40]
In contradistinction to the forms of false simplicity cited above, these simplifiers really occupy themselves with the higher spheres of being; but in their imaginary superiority, they denature the object of their attention and with a kind of glib dexterity doctor it, as it were, until the problem appears to be solved or, rather, enchanted away. They do not treat things adequately but merely tamper with them, though often with a show of success. They walk through life with a boastful smile, proud of being past all obscure problems and grave difficulties. They believe they see through all things and know everything; nor is there anything for which they would not promptly supply an obvious explanation.
This simplicity of platitude, which would strip the cosmos of all depth and all metaphysical stratification, is perhaps even more radically opposed to true Christian simplicity than is the disease of complexity. For he who denies the dimensions of being, its depth and width, and pretends to flatten out the entire universe, is even farther remote from truth than he who ignores the supreme value of inward unity.
Affected childlikeness is not true simplicity
The second variety of illegitimate simplification consists in passing by all problems in a falsely childlike manner, a kind of deliberate innocence—frisch, froh, fromm, fret (“in a brisk, joyous, candid, free way”) as the Germans sometimes put it. Such a person fails to take account of the distance he must travel in order to rise from a lower mode of being to a higher one; he would skip the indispensable phases of maturing and growth; his life, if we may put it thus, is full of short circuits. He sets much store by his childlike innocence, an attitude in which he is fully at his ease, and mistakes it for true simplicity.
He thus goads himself into a simplified and debased conception of the road to eternal salvation, which in fact is a steep and narrow one. He approaches God without a properly discriminating reverence for the mysterious majesty in which He resides concealed. Misinterpreting the evangelical words, “Unless ye become as children,” he enjoys his pose of being childlike and construes his petty and simplifying conception of the metaphysical situation of man, of the mysteries of salvation, and of our transformation in Christ, as a specifically direct relationship with God.
Frequently, too, he escapes from the difficulties of life into that consciousness of being childlike. He thus hopes to pass over with nimble feet the abysmal rifts in human nature. Whenever he should carry his cross he somehow evades it, mistaking Christ’s transfiguration of all suffering for an elimination of all suffering, and equating his own natural, vitalistic optimism with a blissful consideration of all things in conspectu Dei. He is blind to the mysterious differentiation of aspects in the universe; to the presence of stages which have to be climbed and surpassed not without effort, pain, and distress. He does not suspect that true simplicity refers back to the all-comprehensive height in which those degrees are incorporated, and that for this reason only it encompasses an abundance of things and experiences.
It is not a simple thing to attain true simplicity
All these forms of false simplicity, much as they differ from one another, have this in common: that with them, the advantage derived from the avoidance of complexity is outweighed by a grave defect or aberration. It is purchased at the price, either of a self-confinement to a diminutive section of some inferior sphere of being (viewed from a unilateral angle,