The Gospel of the Little Prince
This is an “encore” edition of Skeptical Faith. Hopefully, a new essay will be available next week.
Attention all those concerned only with “matters of great consequence:” Is it possible that you’ve become someone you didn’t want to be, having strayed far from the innocence and simplicity of childhood?
That’s the main question asked in The Little Prince, which Netflix, the streaming video service, has added to its repertoire of movies and TV shows. Though not a big fan of animated flicks, I was a big fan of the book, The Little Prince, back in the 1970s when it became extremely popular in the U.S.
It was first published in French and English in New York in 1943 as a novella by French aristocrat, writer, poet, and pioneering aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who disappeared while piloting a Free French Army plane the following year over the Mediterranean Sea.
Nearly Two Million Copies
“The novella is the fourth most-translated book in the world and was voted the best book of the 20th century in France,” says Wikipedia. “Translated into more than 250 languages and dialects (as well as Braille), selling nearly two million copies annually with sales totaling over 140 million copies worldwide, it has become one of the best-selling books ever published.”
In a simple way, without preaching, Saint-Exupery is able to powerfully convey what is important in life. Although he was a Catholic, it’s not an overtly religious work but highlights many of the most important Christian values. It echoes Jesus’ words about the necessity to “become like children” if we expect to enter into the Kingdom of God.
In fact, it was intended as a children’s book, written for “those who understand life,” Saint-Exupery wrote, contrasting them with people who think and talk “like grown-ups” and who are “concerned with matters of consequence.”
Down in the Sahara
As an aviator, Saint-Exupery’s plane once went down in the Sahara Desert. He survived and his book is about a solo pilot who crashes in the Sahara and is visited by a little prince from another planet – a planet so small that the only other inhabitants are a rose – the love of the Little Prince’s life – and three volcanoes, two active and one extinct.
“But one never knows,” cautions the Little Prince about the extinct volcano.
The movie differs slightly from the book in that in the movie, a little girl meets an eccentric neighbor, an old man who is the pilot and who narrates the story. The book opens with the narrator himself recalling that as a child, he made a drawing of an elephant inside a boa constrictor that had eaten the elephant.
Adults who viewed the drawing said it was a hat. He had to re-draw it to plainly show the elephant inside. Plainly, we grown-ups lack imagination.
The Little Prince, who is young and innocent but wise way beyond his years, tells the downed pilot of his journey, prompted by loneliness, to six planets. On all but one, he is exposed to the narrow-mindedness of grown-ups in the persons of a king, a vain man, a drunkard, a businessman, a lamplighter, and a geographer. Then he visits the earth, where he meets the stranded aviator.
“I know a planet inhabited by a red-faced gentleman,” says the Little Prince. “He’s never smelled a flower. He’s never looked at a star, He’s never loved anyone. He’s never done anything except add up numbers. And all day long he says over and over, just like you, ‘I’m a serious man! I’m a serious man!’ And that puffs him up with pride. But he’s not a man at all – He’s a mushroom!”
I understand that such a book and video are nonsense for many who consider such parables mere sentimentality with little application to the real world. Such people will be unable to understand the psalms or the gospels, either, and must conduct their search for God without such aides.
Important Message
But there’s an important message here for people searching for God. If you get caught up in all that “grown-ups” consider consequential – money, power, prestige, fame, stuff – the search for God will be much harder if not impossible. “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly,” one of the book’s characters asserts; “what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Jesus’ remarks in Mathew’s gospel about becoming like little children was in response to his disciples’ question, “Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?”
The disciples’ question represents a typical concern of grown-ups: how much prestige, honor and glory can I get in life? Clearly, this is a major obstacle in the search for God, and all of us are vulnerable to its attraction.
The Little Prince may be a fictional cartoon character whose story is as unbelievable as that of Little Red Riding Hood, but the book’s message is essential to living happily and to the search for God.
