The Cistercian love of simplicity is more than a pious velleity that somehow crystallized into a system of spirituality bolstered up by arbitrary rules. On the contrary, the pages of the official report on the subject, to which the present pages serve as an appendix, have already shown us that Cistercian simplicity can be traced back to the very roots of Christian spirituality, in St. Benedict and the Fathers of the Church. It remains for us to add a few extremely important quotations