Thus will our life receive its inward unity. We shall no longer be divided owing to our fixation on many equivalent but disparate goods. We are no longer a function of several mutually unconnected currents of life. By the light of true consciousness, all things in our mind and our life are confronted with Christ, and consequently, with one another. Unlike those who are a prey to complexity, we are not hampered by all kinds of irrelevant sentiments nor is our inner freedom disturbed by a multitude of petty or imaginary problems. The lure of what seems interesting can no longer beguile us into wasting our time on the protean pageant of falsehood; there is no longer anything that could divert us to bypaths which lead away from the one supreme Goal. For we have acquired that holy sobriety which renders us unable to bear any but sound doctrine, unlike those who “will not endure sound doctrine; but, according to their own desires, they will heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears: and will indeed turn away their hearing from the truth, but will be turned unto fables” (2 Tim. 4:3-4). On the contrary, all our desire is directed to the “unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Cor. 5:8).

Plain honesty contributes to true simplicity

In their common antithesis to the egoistic attitude of complexity, we perceive the close interrelation between true simplicity and a certain trait of plain honesty, which contains at least a rudiment of Christian humility. All complexity, on the other hand, stems from a root of evil pride. The man of pride uses the manifoldness of his interests and problems, so to speak, as a retinue subservient to his luxury. He surrounds himself with a court of multiple things. For he has lost the center of all comprehensive unity, God; nor does he take it upon himself to find his way back to that center again. He glories in his unsolved complications and attributes a preposterous emphasis to many unimportant things about him because he fails to give its due weight to the one really important thing, the unum necessarium.

The man of plain honesty and simplicity, on the other hand, abhors that pageant of complications, not because he enjoys his own sweet primitivity (this pose of false simplicity is no less a work of pride than is the attitude of complexity), but because he is entirely concentrated on the unum necessarium. He does not leer around him; still less is he watching himself: his eyes are directed straight to the logos of truth, which he follows without restraint.

Continuity in aspiring to God engenders simplicity