Vigils Reading

PERFECT SIMPLICITY

An Excerpt from “The Spirit of Simplicity”5 ◊◊◊

The union of wills, making us one Spirit with God, is the highest and purest and most intimate union that can possibly be achieved by two individuals remaining essentially distinct. This is the culminating ideal of Cistercian simplicity! The paradox is, that the soul itself is more perfectly simple when absorbed in this union than it could ever be outside of it. The soul is never so truly itself as it is when it is lost in God and it is never so unlike itself as when it is completely separated from God and left entirely to itself. The reason for this paradox is in the fact that it is of the very essence of the soul to be like God and therefore it is most truly itself when it becomes, as nearly as is possible to a creature, identified with Him.

In this perfect identification of the soul with God the soul is rightly said to lose itself in God: not in the sense of losing its substance, but in the sense of losing its own will in a perfect union of love with God’s will that makes them truly one will, one spirit. In such a state, the soul has completely forgotten itself and its own interests and desires for the simple reason that it no longer has any interests or desires other than those of God. It no longer has anything whatever of its own… The soul in this perfection of simplicity now loves itself exactly as God loves it, in the same degree, in the same manner — indeed, with the very same love. Even self- love is at last vindicated in this ultimate beatification of the soul!…

St. Bernard describes this union in the tenth chapter of “On Loving God”… “I should call that man holy and blessed, to whom it may be granted to experience such love, even were it only rarely, or but once, and that in a brief flash which might pass and be all over in an instant. For to lose yourself, in a manner of speaking, and to become as though you did not exist, and to lose absolutely all consciousness of yourself, and to go forth from yourself, and to be practically annihilated, all that belongs to heaven. and is utterly above natural human love.”

“However, since Holy Scripture says that God made all things for Himself the creature must surely at some time conform itself to its Creator. Some day, then, we must attain to the same love that God has for us… We shall then delight, not in the fact that all our needs have been satisfied, and all our happiness carried to the ultimate consummation but in the fact that His will in us and for us will then be seen to be completely accomplished and carried out. And this is what we daily ask for in our prayers when we say: Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Oh holy and chaste love! Oh sweet and delightful affection! Oh pure, utterly clean intention of the will, all the cleaner and more pure because no admixture of self remains therein; all the sweeter and more delightful in that what we feel is entirely divine. To love like this is to become a god.”

This, then, is the ultimate limit of Cistercian simplicity: the simplicity of God Himself, belonging to the soul, purified of all admixture of self-love, admitted to a participation in the Divine Nature, and becoming one Spirit with the God of infinite love