The essence of knowledge is the power to control: This idea, deeply ingrained in the “wisdom” of the present age, belongs to the common sense of both the “secular” and the “religious.” In the face of this near-universal consensus, Hans Urs von Balthasar seeks to recover the “simplicity” Jesus speaks of in the Gospels. Christian simplicity, for Balthasar, is not an object whose production is under our control, but the mysterious effortlessness we enter into when we relinquish the illusion of mastery. Far from being a product, Christian simplicity is “reflection of a divine life that gives itself” gratuitously out of love.