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Few people have ever seen or heard of The Spirit of Simplicity: it has been hidden for almost seventy years after quietly being published by the Abbey of Gethsemani in 1948. Anonymously translated and annotated by a young monk named Thomas Merton, the book’s author—who also is not mentioned by name in the original edition—is Jean-Baptiste Chautard, the famous French Cistercian whose only other...

to possess the key to the whole mystical theology of St. Bernard and to hold the solution of all the problems which some may find in the apparent harshness of some of his early statements about humility. The whole tragedy of fallen man, from the point of view of his own spiritual condition, and the proximate cause of all unhappiness is the constant self-contradiction generated within him by the confronting of the essential image of God in his soul with the lost likeness that has been unutterably
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