Simplicity and Complexity: A Christian Guide to Beauty and Design

In our series exploring a Christian guide to beauty and design, we have been looking at the essential properties of beauty. So far, we have examined the properties of unity, diversity, hierarchy, and form. Today, we are going to explore simplicity and complexity.

For something to be beautiful or well-designed, it needs to be both simple and complex, having genuine depth or layers. But what precisely are simplicity and complexity?

Defining Simplicity

Simplicity occurs when a design has nothing extraneous and its form is most optimal. It is when there is just the right amount in just the right way—no excess, nothing else to remove, no waste, and no unfruitfulness. Something possesses simplicity when its surface form is easily accessible and intelligible.

The Cathedral of Notre-Dame, for example, may look complex because of its detail, but the highest level of its form is simple. Now, simplicity is not dumbing something down. Rather, it is a concentration, a crystallization, a kind of focusing. It assumes that you understand the hierarchy of a thing and are able to communicate at the highest level of that hierarchy: the surface level. It is like poetry—a density of language, not a thinning of it.

Simplicity is often spoken of alongside elegance, and rightly so. When a skilled artist is able to compose a work with simplicity, that requires elegance, because in order to distill a work down to its core, you have to know what belongs to the core and what does not. That is, you have to know the hierarchy of the work. You have to know what is of first importance, second importance, and third importance.

This is one reason why I always tell students going into college to never take classes with young professors. One of the most common problems with young professors is that while they may know a lot about the topic of their dissertation, they are often neither knowledgeable nor experienced enough to properly simplify a subject. You might take a course on the French Revolution, and afterward a friend asks you to give a summary of it. You realize that you cannot, and the only thing you really remember is a handful of facts about coinage during the period, simply because that is what the young professor wrote his dissertation on. He was not yet skilled enough to properly simplify the subject—not to dumb it down, but to follow the main melodic line of the material.

Simplicity provides an ease of entry into a work because the main shape or theme is clearly communicated in its most distilled form. This allows many people to enjoy the work, because the surface level—the most obvious and clear thing, like the woman in the Mona Lisa or the famous four-note opening motif in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—is immediately accessible.

Let us look at simplicity in a concrete work of art: Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome Writing. There is a striking, beautiful simplicity to this work. Jerome is translating the Bible into Latin—producing the Latin Vulgate. The main compositional shape is a balanced table or bridge. On each side sits a figure or head and a drape of cloth. It presents a balanced, simple surface. Yet that is not all. Found within this simplicity are layers of profound complexity that we will examine more closely after we define complexity itself.

The Nature of Complexity

Complexity is multiplying things. We want objects not just to be without excess, but in another sense to be excessive—to be more than what meets the eye on the surface. We desire things to have depth, to possess layers that unfold upon inspection. We want works that are not exhausted upon a first look.

This is both the way the world is made and how we create things within it. Things consist of parts and layers. A computer program is broken up into modules, functions, and objects. A building is organized into wings and floors. The natural world is structured into physics, chemistry, and biology; music into movements, notes, and themes. It did not have to be this way. Your hand could have been just skin all the way down, without divisions into layers of chemicals, cells, and atomic and subatomic particles.

This desire for layers and depth is entirely natural. You want to know that your wife is both physically and intellectually beautiful. This is why we feel a tension when an author’s or artist’s personal life is less exemplary than his work: we want beauty to go all the way down, for the layers to be connected and unified. This is why we read books and watch movies, assuming there is something more there that is not exhausted right on the surface.

Layers of Meaning in Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome

Now let us return to the complexity in Caravaggio’s Saint Jerome. Jerome is translating the scriptures into Latin, the common language of the people, producing what would become the most important translation for hundreds of years. In this balanced composition, Jerome is writing, looking down intently at his work, while a skull stares directly back at him.

The skull is a symbol of death. Jerome is an old man, and death is drawing near. But notice that the skull is not faring well in this encounter. First, the skull’s gaze is physically obstructed by the quill—the instrument writing the scriptures, the very thing that guards against death. Second, the skull rests precariously on a tilted book, as if it is about to slide off the table and fall out of the frame, destroyed by the sword that is the quill. Third, while it might first appear that the skull is consuming the open scripture, it has actually been transformed into a utilitarian object: it holds open the sacred text, actively assisting Jerome in his translation work. Through Christ’s death and resurrection, death has been transformed. It is no longer menacing and fearful, but has been rendered helpful, a mere utility.

Jerome himself appears gaunt yet strong, shrouded in blood-red vitality. In his furious labor, he has placed a book on top of the inkwell and the skull on top of that; perhaps in his motion he is in the midst of striking it and knocking it off. In spite of his advanced age, he is the figure filled with life and red vitality, actively attacking death with word and quill. Death stares at him, but he ignores it entirely.

Notice also that the circularity of his halo is mimicked by the circular dish in which the inkwell sits: his holiness flows directly from the words of scripture. Notice too how Jerome’s extended arm has conformed to the horizontal shape of the open scriptures. While he is copying the scriptures, his very posture is being conformed to them.

All these simple actions, gestures, images, and symbols communicate layers of complexity within an overall simplicity of form. Each layer of complexity is not added at random; it is unified, deepening the meaning established on the surface. All the layers form a unity that permutes the core themes and theses of the surface structure.

The Aesthetic Mistake

Here we should address a common aesthetic mistake. One of the great mistakes in art occurs when an artist ignores surface simplicity altogether and attempts to place complexity directly on the surface. The problem is compounded because that complex surface is frequently unordered.

This tendency is characteristic of certain art-house films, avant-garde art and architecture, and postmodern literature. Often, creators who do this regard simplification as an adulteration—a corruption of true depth. In reality, it reveals a lack of skill and an inability to condense a subject to its core. It betrays an ignorance of the hierarchy of the parts of the work, failing to distinguish which elements are primary, secondary, and tertiary.

Simplicity and Complexity in God and Scripture

Ultimately, simplicity and complexity are necessary aesthetic properties because they are properties of God. God is both simple and complex, possessing both accessibility and depth.

We must, however, make one theological qualification regarding the simplicity of God. There is a formal doctrine of divine simplicity that has a long history in Christian theology, which is connected to, but not identical with, the aesthetic simplicity we are discussing here. The classical doctrine of simplicity states that God is not composed of parts. I, by contrast, am composed of parts: you could remove my hair or cut off my finger and I would still be me, albeit painfully. You cannot do that with God, because He is without parts.

The simplicity we are discussing here, however, concerns surface intelligibility—the clear understanding of the highest level of hierarchy. In this sense, God is remarkably simple on the surface. The opposite of this would be something like a Jackson Pollock painting, which presents unmediated complexity right on the surface.

Consider how simplicity and complexity appear in both God and His word. God is surprisingly easy to know. We have developed a concise collection of “omni” attributes—omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, omnibenevolence—that give us a simple, accessible description of God’s nature. The apostle Paul tells us that God has made Himself plainly known in creation for all to see. Entrance into the community of faith is accomplished not through rigorous intellectual gymnastics or the acquisition of secret, esoteric knowledge, but by simple trust in Jesus. Jesus Himself explicitly invites little children to come to Him, and the historic summaries of faith produced by the church are wonderfully straightforward.

Scripture exhibits this same surface simplicity. Gregory the Great famously remarked that scripture is like a river broad and deep, shallow enough in one place for a lamb to wade, but deep enough in another for an elephant to swim. I do not know of any other text in human history that has more doctoral dissertations written on it each year while simultaneously being taught with ease to young children in homes and Sunday schools. It is the mark of the highest genius to communicate profound depth through surface simplicity.

Yet alongside this simplicity, God and His word are profoundly complex. Solomon observes in Proverbs that it is the glory of God to conceal a matter, and the glory of kings to search it out. God delights to plunge profound truths below the surface for us to discover. True works of art should require labor to unfold, just as persons do.

Just as scripture is complex, so God Himself is complex. We see this in the principle of progressive revelation, where God unfolds more of His character and purposes over historical time. We also see it in the direct affirmations of scripture. Paul cries out in Romans 11:

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

Paul recognizes that there are unsearchable depths in God, which necessarily presupposes that there is also an accessible surface. The author of Hebrews similarly urges believers to leave the elementary doctrines of Christ and press on to maturity, not laying again a foundation—recognizing that there are foundational surface teachings about Christ as well as mature, deeper truths. Consider also the conclusion of the book of Job, where God barrages Job with a series of cosmic questions to show him just how much divine activity is constantly occurring beneath the surface of human perception.

We naturally love things that are simultaneously simple and complex: accessible yet rich, mature, layered, and deep; things that cannot be exhausted on a first look, yet can be immediately comprehended on that first look.

I want to close with one of my favorite passages from John Donne:

My God, my God, thou art a direct God, may I not say a literal God, a God that would be understood literally, and according to the plain sense of all that thou sayest? But thou art also (Lord, I intend it to thy glory, and let no profane misinterpreter abuse it to thy diminution) thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too; a God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors, such extensions, such spreadings, such curtains of allegories, such third heavens of hyperboles, so harmonious elocutions, so retired and so reserved expressions, so commanding persuasions, so persuading commandments, such sinews even in thy milk, and such things in thy words, as all profane authors seem of the seed of the serpent, that creeps, thou art the Dove, that flies.

Watch the original episode.