The Depths of Simplicity

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

The world has one supreme test for character, and that is the possession of a virtue in a high and eminent degree.

Many generals, for example, in our national history are ranked as men of great character because of their valor, and many scientists are ranked as men of great character because of their wisdom. Some are judged noble because of their love of peace, others because of their bravery in war, some because of their majesty, and others because of their gentleness; some because of their wisdom, others because of their simplicity.

But this is not the real way to judge character. The possession of one virtue in an eminent degree no more makes a man great than one wing makes a bird.

Just as the eagle’s power is measured by the distance from the extremity of one wing to the extremity of the other, so a man’s character is to be judged, not by the possession of one extreme virtue but by the expanse between that virtue and the opposite one which complements it. Christian character is nothing more nor less than the reconciling of opposite virtues.

In other words, a really great character is not just a brave man, because if a man were brave without being tender, he might very easily become cruel. Tenderness is what might be called the other wing to bravery.

In like manner, majesty alone does not make character, for majesty without gentleness might very soon degenerate into pride. Love of peace alone does not make character, for without the opposite virtue of courage, peacefulness could very easily slip into a spineless cowardice. Wisdom without simplicity makes a man proud; simplicity without wisdom makes a man a simpleton.

A person of real character therefore does not possess a virtue on a given point on the circumference without at the same time possessing complementary virtue which is diametrically opposed to it; for what is character, but the tension between opposites, the equilibrium between extremes.

St. Paul exhibits in his life the beautiful tension between zeal and gentleness; St. John manifests the tension between overflowing love and uncompromising devotion to truth; and Moses the tension between firmness and meekness.

Just as every engine must have its flywheel, every springtime its harvest, every ocean its ebb and its tide, so every person of really great character must have his or her pendulum so delicately adjusted that it can swing between the extremes of the magnanimous and the humble, the lofty and the plain, without ever once being detached. Character, then, is the balanced tension between opposite virtues.

It is in this sense that the character of Our Lord rises above all men and makes Him the Perfect Exemplar of goodness and the Paragon of virtues. One might show how He combined Majesty and Gentleness, Peacefulness and Force, Magnanimity and Humility, but for the sake of brevity we limit ourselves only to the two extreme virtues which He recommended to His apostles at the beginning of His public life: Wisdom and Simplicity. “Be as wise as serpents,” we’re told in St. Matthew, “and as innocent as doves” (Matt. 10:16).

Our Lord did not make this recommendation without possessing it in an eminent degree Himself. He was wise with the Wisdom of God; but He was simple with the simplicity of a child. That is why He came to us as the world’s God-Child.

But what is more remarkable still, He never used His wisdom before the simple, but only before those who thought themselves wise. He was wisdom before the so-called wise, but He was simplicity before the simple. He exceeded the worldly wise with His wisdom and the simple with His simplicity.

First, He outdid the worldly wise with His wisdom. Take for example the scene in the Temple at the beginning of His public ministry. The Passover was drawing near, and pilgrims from Galilee began to gather into Jerusalem.

Our Lord came with the throng and entered through the Golden Gate into the Temple. As He passed beneath the arch and came into the Court of the Gentiles, the open space before the steps that led up to the Holy Place, a busy scene lay before Him.

It was more than the mere jostling of crowds paying their yearly tribute of half a shekel to the Temple Treasury. Rather here was a bedlam of confusion.

In the heat of that April day were hundreds of merchants and shopkeepers mingling the cry of their wares with the bleating of sheep and the bellowing of oxen. There were little men with big wicker cages filled with doves, and under the very shadow of the arcades sat the moneychangers wrangling in the most dishonest of trades, their greedy eyes aflame with the lust of gain.

Everywhere there was huckstering, quarreling, bargaining, and the clanking of money to be heard above the chant of the Levites and the prayers of the Priests. And all this at the entrance to the Temple of the Most High.

When Our Lord entered the Temple, a righteous indignation laid hold of Him, for what is character but a beautiful tension between force and meekness. An anger divorced from meekness is but unsanctified passion, and meekness which cannot kindle into indignation is closely allied to moral collapse.

And on the occasion, Our Lord’s swift indignation was just as much a part of His Perfect Sanctity as His silent meekness in the hour of the Passion. He could not, being Justice itself, be silent before an offense against God.

His eyes burned with a controlled anger; His firm face set in commanding scorn. His hands reached out to some bits of binding cord lying on the floor beside Him. With His fingers, rapidly yet calmly, He knotted them into a whip.

The traffickers stood still; the merchants eyed Him with growing fear. Then they stepped back from Him as One whom they had reason to fear.

Then quietly but firmly He began to move His tiny whip of knotted cord. The frightened crowd yielded, and sheep and cattle broke and fled. With His foot He overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, as they rushed to the floor to gather up their jingling coins from the filth and pollution.

Before those who sold doves He stood still, for the dove was the offering of the poor, and there was less desecration in their lovely emblems of innocence and purity. To these He was more gentle. He did not scatter them; He did not break the baskets and release the doves; to their owners He spoke tenderly: “Get these out of here,” we’re told in St. Matthew, “and stop making my Father’s house a place of trade” (cf. Matt. 21:12-13, Mark 11:5-17).

And His disciples seeing this transport of inspiring and glorious anger, recalled to mind what David had written of Him in prophecy. We’re told in the Psalms: “Zeal for your house consumes me” (Ps. 69:9; John 2:17).

And if we ask why the greedy traffickers did not resist as their oxen were chased into the street and their money flung on the floor, the answer is because sin is weakness; because there is nothing in the world so utterly abject and helpless as a guilty conscience; because nothing is so invincible as the sweeping tide of God-like indignation against all that is base and wrong; because vice cannot stand for a moment before Virtue’s uplifted arm.

Base and low as they were, every one of them with a remnant of a soul not yet eaten away by infidelity and avarice knew that the Son of Man was right.

All the while there was standing on the marble steps that led up to the Holy of Holies, a group of Levites, scribes, and Pharisees who knew what a heavy loss that stampede would cause the merchants and themselves.

They looked for the cause of the commotion and saw that He who provoked it all was a carpenter from lowly Nazareth, with no mark of office about Him, no scrolls, no ensigns of dignity, but only an uplifted hand. They were indignant. How dare this obscure workingman with a few ill-smelling fishermen as companions arrogate authority to Himself within the Temple precincts, in which they alone were the masters?

They moved down the steps to Him, as He stood alone with the whip cord in His hand and asked Him: “By what authority do you do these things? Who gave you this authority?” (Matt. 21:23; Mark 11:28).

He might have pointed His finger at the panic-stricken crowd as a sign that all men fear the Justice of God. But these were learned men, skilled in the Scriptures, and wise in their own conceits. And before those who thought themselves wise, Our Lord was wiser. He would show to them a Wisdom so deep, so profound, so revealing the truth of their Scripture, that not even they, the wise men of Israel, would understand.

In fact, what He said was so deep that it took them almost three years to understand it. Firmly and solemnly with a gesture centered on Himself, He said something beyond their comprehension, something which in its apparent meaning filled them with perfect stupor and angry amazement because they understood not its depth.

The words were over their heads, at the same time they stole into their hearts: “Destroy this Temple, and in three days I will raise it up,” we’re told in St. John (John 2:19).

Destroy this Temple! This Temple, they thought, on which Solomon had lavished his wealth! This temple on which ten thousand workmen enrolled as they brought the cedars of Lebanon to its walls! This Temple with its fragrant woods, embroidered veils, precious stones, glittering roofs! This temple which was forty-six years in the building and was far from finished!

And this obscure Galilean youth bade them destroy it, and He would rebuild it in three days! Such was the false construction they put upon His words, because they were not wise enough to understand the wisdom of God.

Our Lord did not mean that earthly Temple before them, but the Temple of His Body. But why call His Body a Temple? Because a Temple is the place where God dwells.

He was therefore equivalently saying: The real Temple in which God dwells is not that place of stone but this tabernacle of living flesh which I have taken from my Mother, for I am the Holy of Holies: I am the Son of the Living God. I am the real Temple of the Most High!

Such Wisdom was too profound even for the wise of this earth. It was not until three years later that it began to dawn upon them, when the temple they destroyed on Good Friday was rebuilt by the Power of God on Easter Sunday; and even the Truth, too, is so deep and profound that some of our wise men today have not yet begun to understand it even after nineteen hundred years.

Our Lord told His apostles not only to be as wise as serpents, but as simple as doves. And what He told them, He lived. He was not only wise with the Wisdom of God—He was simple with the simplicity of a child.

This might be proved by His fondness for children whom His disciples one day forbade to come near Him. Our Lord reproved them with, “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them, for of such as these is the Kingdom of God!” (Mark 10:14).

And when He had folded them in His arms, laid His hands upon them and blessed them, He added once more the warning that we must have simple faith like little children, and that their ignorance is more illumined than the doctrines of wise men for only a clear and untarnished mirror can reflect the image of His Revelation.

But His simplicity is better indicated in His attitude to those grown-up children of whom He said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you hid these things from the wise and intelligent and revealed them to mere babes” (Matt. 11:25).

A case very much in point is the simplicity of Our Lord before the Syrophoenician woman. In the middle of His public life, Our Lord, driven from Galilee, driven from Judea, made His way as a wanderer on the earth to the coast of Syria where stood the cities of Tyre and Sidon fast falling into ruins.

No sooner had He come into these cities than a poor, infirm woman approached Him. She was a Gentile, and therefore what a Jew proud of his noble ancestry would call a contemptible Canaanite, what a Roman, whose subject she was, would call a Syrophoenician or a more or less degenerate Greek.

She had a daughter, now growing up, who was suffering from an unclean spirit and quite mad. This shame obliged her to live rather apart from her neighbors.

But when she heard the great Wonder-Worker had come into her city, she felt she had to go and see Him, even though He was a Jew and she a Gentile. She ran to Him, and at a distance noticed He was kindly, gentle, and above all, simple. She heard her Jewish friends call Him Lord: and others, “Son of David.”

She would call Him both and throwing herself at His feet with a piercing petition she cried, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David! My daughter is severely tormented by a demon!” (Matt. 15:22).

Our Lord did not look displeased but He answered her not a word. He walked on, testing her faith and her perseverance. But she walked on too, pleading, begging, and praying.

The disciples bade her to leave, but she refused. Becoming indignant at her annoying plea, they besought Our Lord saying, “Send her away—she keeps crying out behind us” (Matt. 15:23).

Our Lord looked down at her sweetly, but what He said seemed to approve His disciples. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,” He told her (Matt. 15:24).

She seemed to sense it was not a rebuke, otherwise He would have sent her away as His disciples had bidden Him to do. He had not said He would not cure her daughter. He had only said His mission was first to His own people.

She would try again—so she threw herself at His sacred feet in adoration and with more appeal than ever, looked into His eyes saying: “Lord, help me!” (Matt. 15:25).

Could He remain untouched by that sorrow? Would He leave her to a lifelong agony of watching the paroxysms of her demoniac child?

Calmly there came from those lips that never yet left unanswered a suppliant’s prayer, words which reminded her that she was not of the house of Israel: “It isn’t right to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs” (Matt. 15:26).

But not all the snows of Lebanon could quench the fires of love and hope which burned on the great altar of her heart, and prompt as an echo came, not an answer, but a glorious retort: “Yes, Lord—but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their master’s table” (Matt. 15:27).

If a self-wise Pharisee had made a retort of that kind, Our Lord would have withered Him with His wisdom, but when a simple soul makes a retort against Divinity and says she is only a dog begging for a crumb, then He becomes so simple as to be seemingly vanquished by her simplicity.

He who exalted Himself amidst the proud humbles Himself before the humble; He who was wise with His profound meaning of the word “Temple” before those who thought themselves wise, is now simple before a Syrophoenician with her simple turn of the word “dog.”

His heart expands, His lips move: “O woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish” (Matt. 15:28). Wonderful wisdom! Wonderful simplicity!

Such is the character of Christ. A God and a Child. Oh, will our world ever learn to imitate that beautiful tension between opposites? Will it go on dividing itself into the two classes of the educated and the uneducated, the literate and the illiterate, heaping praise on the so-called wise who reject the Wisdom of God and pouring scorn on the simple who accept it?

Or will it someday, under the magic touch of Christ, discover that the truest wisdom is in being simple, and the truest simplicity is in being Wise with the Wisdom of God?

It is easy to be one or the other, but it is difficult to be both; just as it is easy to have nothing, and easy to possess everything, but it is difficult to live having nothing and yet possessing everything.

That is why it is easy to be anything but a good Christian. It is hard to grow wiser and yet still be simple enough to want to be taught, and yet that is the condition of entering heaven.

No “old” people enter it—using old in the sense of those full of the conceit of years. Neither do the intelligentsia nor the sophisticated. “Whoever doesn’t accept the Kingdom of God like a little child shall not enter it!” (Mark 10:15). There are only nurseries there!

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

EW

From The Eternal Galilean, Chapter X, Fulton J. Sheen (1934).