Every genuine value as such, however, operates towards true simplicity in him who experiences it; and it does so in proportion to its place in the hierarchy of values. Our state of mind always reveals greater simplicity when a genuine value is possessing and shaping us than when we are engrossed with neutral concerns, as are mostly the requirements of workaday life. Certainly, any dealing with creaturely goods, notwithstanding the formal simplifying power of values as such, may interfere with our disposition for simplicity; it will do so with certainty whenever we, in attending to these goods, isolate them from the world of higher values and detach them from their function of a representation of God.

Yet, however real this danger may be, considering the natural proneness of our fallen natures to let outward influences distract them from God, the created goods are also capable, on the other hand, of elevating us towards God in various ways and of apprising us of His charity and His glory. Only if we receive every good (by the methods just described) in mindfulness of God and qua gifts and tokens of God—if in all values we are anxious to discern and to meet God—then the formal simplifying power of every value as such will become operative and conducive to true simplicity.

Values elevate us above a multiplicity of interests

As regards the relation between value and simplicity of soul, the following aspects should be noted. To begin with, every value by reason of its wealth of meaning elevates us above the extensive multiplicity of the interests belonging to lower planes. The higher that value is, the more we find (in a comparative sense) all in one. In our response to that value, our interest will expand in depth rather than in breadth. Yet, depth as such, even apart from the specific height of the value concerned, acts in favor of simplicity, inasmuch as it implies a recollected state of mind and a withdrawal from peripheral interests.

Values unify communities and individuals

Moreover values are characterized by a certain vis unitiva: a faculty of coordination and unification, both in an interpersonal and an intrapersonal sense. Definite values may integrate a number of persons into a community; and again, within a person they tend to effect an integration of divergent emotions and impulses. Counteracting the dispersion and dissipation of energies in our soul, they tend to make us recollected and simple. This effect increases with the height of the value. It is only in our surrender to God, our loving adoration of Him, that we are wholly collected and our whole essence is actualized in one all-comprehensive attitude.