The word “simple” has a negative connotation when describing a person. I state this based on conversations I’ve had. In a conversation with friends, I said: “That person is simple.” I said this in admiration, though, it was treated as a put-down. Maybe I need to find better friends, but I think this is a sentiment in wider society. Hardly anyone wants to be called “simple.”
The image of Forrest Gump comes to mind. A simple person may stumble through life and succeed through innocence and goodness, but he is ultimately unaware of the larger forces at work in the world or within himself. Forrest Gump was a product of the optimistic 1990s, as the simple, yet, good, were seen as able to navigate the cultural and political forces of previous decades. Now, however, the “end of history” is anything but, as we’ve grappled with 9/11, the 2008 financial meltdown, climate change, and continuous wars. Democracies are under threat. The hopes and fears of the world have changed in the last thirty years.
Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche have supposedly diagnosed the issues plaguing us and helped us all tear the mask off of society to gaze on bare reality: the desire for power and control inside of each person and which extends throughout society. The world of tech, neoliberalism, and social media abhors simplicity, but seeks to capture the attention of the simple. The simple are ignorant of the powers that be and end up being ruled by the powerful. Education and protest seem to be the answer. Our world is complex, so we need to be knowledgable of the complexity. “Get woke” is to be aware of the powers that be and to act appropriately. Knowledge is power and simplicity is a vice.
Sed contra: Christ, sending his apostles out into the world, tells them to “be shrewd as serpents and simple as doves.” (Matt 10:16). Simplicity is a habit of being unassuming and unpretentious. When simplicity concerns things divine, Fr. John Hardon, SJ, defines it as a supernatural virtue: simplicity seeks only to do the will of God without regard to self-sacrifice or self-advantage. A person who is simple will be honest and straightforward. The figures of Martha and Mary in the Gospel represent simplicity and its inverse. Martha is active and caring for practical things but is also distracted with her attention dispersed. Whereas Mary, through her sole focus on Christ, has chosen the better part. The priority is to focus on the Lord, and then take care of the practical things of life.
Simplicity ought to be linked with the cardinal virtue of prudence. Prudence is an intellectual virtue; it is having the correct knowledge of what ought to be done and what ought to be avoided. The simple person who does not have prudence lacks knowledge of how to act and is the unassuming fool. The simple who lack prudence may be taken advantage of by others. The virtues of prudence and simplicity work together.
The perfection of these virtues, through helping the person grow in goodness, allows the person to be perfected in truth.1 This perfection in truth allows the person to speak truth. To see this exemplified, we turn now to the figure of Cordelia in the novel, Brideshead Revisited.
Brideshead Revisited is a beautiful story of paradoxes and contradictions. Charles Ryder, while at Oxford in the 1920s, befriends Sebastian Flyte and his family. Sebastian comes from English Catholic aristocracy. Charles (a product of modern, bourgeois culture) doesn’t think too much about religion. Yet, he is bewildered by both the Flytes staunch faith and their moral failings. Charles is most confused by the devotion and simplicity of the youngest Flyte sibling, Cordelia:
When we were alone [Cordelia] said: “Are you really an agnostic?”
“Does your family always talk about religion all the time?”
“Not all the time. It’s a subject that just comes up naturally, doesn’t it?”
“Does it? It never has with me before.”
“Then perhaps you are an agnostic. I’ll pray for you.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“I can’t spare you a whole rosary you know. Just a decade. I’ve got such a long list of people. I take them in order and they get a decade about once a week.”
“I’m sure it’s more than I deserve.”
—
“Cordelia has promised to pray for me,” I said.
“She made a novena for her pig,” said Sebastian.
“You know all this is very puzzling to me,” I said.
“I think we’re causing scandal,” said Brideshead.
Cordelia is full of energy, zeal and devotion. She structures her life around her faith, demonstrating her simplicity of soul. At the same time, her simplicity is also shown through her straightforwardness. She is not afraid to speak her mind to the nuns at her school:
“Charles,” said Cordelia, “Modern Art is all bosh, isn’t it?”
“Great bosh.”
“Oh, I’m so glad. I had an argument with one of our nuns and she said we shouldn’t try and criticize what we didn’t understand. Now I shall tell her I have had it straight from a real artist, and snubs to her.”
In one scene, Charles takes Cordelia out to dinner. There, she reveals her desire to be a nun. Charles has no time for such talk:
“You’ll fall in love,” I said.
“Oh, pray not. I say, do you think I could have another of those scrumptious meringues?”
The Cordelia that Charles first meets is a child; she lives simplicity through single minded devotion to the Lord in prayer and plainly speaking her mind. Experience in the world will help Cordelia grow in the virtue of prudence.
Charles and Cordelia cross paths again twelve years later. Cordelia had joined a group of religious sisters and worked in an ambulance during the Spanish Civil War. She returns home to Brideshead, diminished in Charles eyes. He found her appearance and demeanor appalling:
It hurt to think of Cordelia growing up “quite plain;” to think of all that burning love spending itself on serum-injections and delousing powder. When she arrived, tired from her journey, rather shabby, moving in the manner of one who has no interest in pleasing, I thought her an ugly woman. It was odd, I thought, how the same ingredients, differently dispensed, could produce Brideshead, Sebastian, Julia and her. She was unmistakably their sister, without any of Julia’s or Sebastian’s grace, without Brideshead’s gravity. She seemed brisk and matter-of-fact, steeped in the atmosphere of camp and dressing-station, so accustomed to gross suffering as to lose the finer shades of pleasure. She looked more than her twenty-six years; hard living had roughened her; constant intercourse in a foreign tongue had worn away the nuances of speech; she straddled a little as she sat by the fire, and when she said, “It’s wonderful to be home,” it sounded to my ears like the grunt of an animal returning to its basket.
The Flytes were known for their charm and grace. Cordelia fled from that and is transformed by the suffering of the war. Charles does not understand her, as he is a sophisticated aesthete living a pleasurable life. By this time, Charles had divorced his wife and entered into a relationship with Cordelia’s sister, Julia. Julia also had left an unhappy marriage. In light of all of this, Charles considers Cordelia a brute. She has lost out on the pleasures that make life delightful.
Rather than pursue a comfortable life, Cordelia spent her “burning love” in the discomfort of serving others. She demonstrates simplicity by her single-minded devotion to following the Lord without self-advantage. She cares for the suffering of others and sacrifices her youth to do it. Cordelia pursued the “one thing necessary.”
As they converse with one another, Charles’ view of Cordelia begins to change, though he’s still confused. Cordelia tells Charles the conditions that she found her brother, Sebastian, in Morocco. Sebastian still suffers from alcoholism after all these years:
No one is ever holy without suffering. It’s taken that form with him,… I’ve seen so much suffering in the last few years; there’s so much coming for everybody soon. It’s the spring of love…”
Cordelia’s simplicity along with the prudence she gained during the war allows her to see something beautiful about the suffering that Sebastian endures. This confounds Charles.
Cordelia continues:
“When you met me last night did you think, ‘Poor Cordelia, such an engaging child, grown up a plain and pious spinster, full of good works’? Did you think ‘thwarted’?”
It was no time for prevarication. “Yes,” I said, “I did; I don’t now, so much.”
“It’s funny,” she said, “that’s exactly the word I thought of for you and Julia. When we were up in the nursery with nanny. ‘Thwarted passion,’ I thought.”
Again, Cordelia’s experience of war allows her to grow in prudence. The simplicity she cultivated as a child carries her to Spain, which is then purified and allied with prudence. This perfection in truth gives her a clarity of vision regarding the relationship of Charles and Julia. She can name the frustration they feel in spite of their circ*mstances. They both left their spouses for each other and live comfortable, unmarried lives. Their lives are free from any sort of religious or moral attachments. Yet, there is something unfulfilled in their relationship.
Later in the evening, as Charles reflects on Cordelia’s words, he notices a renewed sadness in Julia:
…I realized that she had regained what I thought she had lost forever, the magical sadness which had drawn me to her, the thwarted look that had seemed to say, ‘Surely I was made for some other purpose than this?”
That night I woke in the darkness and lay awake turning over in my mind the conversation with Cordelia.
Charles and Julia both are looking for something definite and permanent. They thought they found it in each other, but something is still missing. They both seek to fully possess each other in complete happiness, but happiness remains elusive. The fulfillment of their desires are “thwarted.” Cordelia sees clearly their situation that they are unable (or unwilling) to see. Grace slowly unfolds in their lives towards the end of the novel.
Simplicity is a virtue to be cultivated. What does it mean for us today? Simplicity is single-mindedly focusing on the Lord. This must be allied with prudence to navigate the forces that are in the world. The growth in these virtues perfects the person and allows her to see truth. Growing in truth allows her to see the real foundations of the world. At the foundation is not power, contra Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. At the foundation of being is the Supreme Good that sustains all things. Through simplicity and prudence, Cordelia sees the truth of suffering and love, and speaks to this. This is when simplicity is dangerous. It threatens to peel back the masks we wear and expose us to grace. This is what truly transforms.
1
Aquinas, ST II-II. Q109. A2. https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3109.htm#article2
