A conversation between a kid’s book and a medieval philosopher
The first children’s book I got my god-daughter was The Little Prince. I’ll admit right off the bat, I watched the movie first. I loved the 2015 Netflix adaptation. But both versions imbued in me a sense of childlike wonderment. The book surprised my sister-in-law when she read it to my niece who was probably too young to understand it at all. “It’s so serious,” she said. Make no mistake, The Little Prince isn’t just a children’s story. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 tale explores hard truths about life, friendship, and loss. A boy from an asteroid traveling across various planets must befriend eccentric characters like a pilot and a fox to find his way home again. Of all the Prince’s relationships, none was as special and beautiful as the Prince and his rose. A single red flower growing on a tiny planet catches the Prince’s eye. They get to know one another as the Prince cares for the rose daily, shielding it from danger. His rose is surely the most special in the whole world, or so he believes. However, on one of his visits to another planet, the Prince encounters flowers that look just like his rose at home. At first, such a sight disappoints the Prince. He starts to think that maybe his rose was not so special after all. After some reflection and with renewed confidence the Little Prince says to the flowers,
“My rose, all on her own, is more important than all of you together, since she’s the one I’ve watered. Since she’s the one I put under glass, since she’s the one I sheltered behind the screen. Since she’s the one for whom I killed the caterpillars (except the two or three butterflies). Since she’s the one I listened to when she complained, or when she boasted, or even sometimes when she said nothing at all. Since she’s my rose.”
The Prince has a singular love for his rose because he has wasted time with her and her alone. There’s something to say about the perspective of a child, who sees each interaction as something new, unique, and surprising. This is how the Prince sees his rose even amidst flowers that look just like her. The Prince sees the reality with his heart, that there is no other rose like his rose, that what’s most important and fundamental is the uniqueness of each thing.
Enter John Duns Scotus and Franciscan ‘Haeccaeitas’
For the first thousand years of the Christian church’s history, many theologians adopted Plato’s philosophy which held that there were perfect and eternal ‘ideas’ of each thing in the material world, and all individual things with their particularities were deviations from the ideal. In this worldview, God creates with this ‘ideal’ in mind first. Of course with high ideals comes a strong sense of inadequacy. The things which make a being unique and special almost seem like an afterthought. The Little Prince sees a different world, a world where the individual in its uniqueness is radically beautiful. “What is essential is invisible to the eye,” the Little Prince wisely teaches. The Prince keenly senses that there is something beneath the surface of each person, beyond the commonalities, that is fundamental and real. Before any other consideration, God desires and intends to create that invisible ‘you’ that can only be known or discovered through relationship. The Franciscan tradition affirms this radical preference for the dignity of the individual. John Duns Scotus argued in the 14th C. that a person’s “thisness,” (Haecceitas for all you Latin nerds out there) or that which makes each individual thing its special self, is what God intends and creates. For example, God didn’t wake up more than 25 years ago before my birthday and say, “I think today I’m going to create some sort of boy, we’ll see how he turns out.” No, God woke and said, “Today, I must have Tyler!” That may seem arrogant and silly, I know. But so it is with you and every created thing on the planet and in the universe. Every grain of sand, every blade of grass (hell, every particle) is created special and is uniquely loved into existence. From Scotus’ perspective, there’s no ideal personality or mold to which God hopes his creatures conform. God wants you, no reservations! Unfortunately, many people still operate in a “platonic” worldview, where some prefer to worship the ideal rather than celebrate an individual’s unique beauty. So what does this all mean? Well… what if we loved each other like the Little Prince loved his flower, how Scotus says God loves each of us? What if Christians recognized each person as they are as a gift from God? Not trying to fit others into molds. Not obsessing over another person’s shortcomings. When we look left to right in the pews, do we see our neighbors, do we know their names? Or do we see an ‘other,’ unable to look past our judgments or our expectations of the “ideal person?” Can we withstand people’s differences, maybe even appreciate them? Scotus scholar Mary Beth Ingham said, “Wherever and whenever we love the persons, creatures and beings around us, there Franciscans identify beauty.” The Little Prince believed that when he befriended someone, that person became unique in all the world. Can we do the same for the people around us? Scotus calls the church to a deeper sense of her story and challenges us in the church today to recognize that the most fundamental reality is the person sitting in front of you.
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