But You Can’t Know for Sure

“Well, it would comfort me very much to know for sure, but instead, I choose to believe he’s up there.”

The Little Prince (2015)

Le Petit Prince was the set text my A-level French teacher chose that my year should study for our final exam.¹ Par conséquence, I find myself, upon starting to plan this blog post, beset by nagging convictions that I really ought to mention Major Themes of the Novel like its portrayal of les grands personnes versus les enfants, and its emphasis on seeing with the heart; that I must at some point quote ce qui est essentiel est invisible aux yeux; and that it would be far more appropriate for me to be writing en français. Désolée. English only henceforth, I promise.²

 

Blimey, betalars at newgrounds.com is a gifted individual - to whom I owe hearty thanks for this beautiful depiction of the little prince and his rose watching a sunrise.

In any case, I’m not really writing today about the novel I read for my A-level, but about the recent Netflix film adaptation of it.³ Le Petit Prince is a very short book: the basic plot is that a pilot who has crashed his plane in the desert inexplicably meets a small boy – the titular little prince – who claims to be from another planet and to have had various interesting encounters on his travels to, and subsequently on, the earth. To pad that out into a feature-length film, Netflix’s version adds a framing device in which the now-elderly pilot cultivates a friendship with the young girl who has just moved into the house next door to him; he achieves this to a large degree through telling her, by a combination of in-person and on-paper narration, the tale of the little prince. Although the bulk of the film is CGI-animated – as per the usual in this day and age – these flashback scenes to the little prince’s original story are rendered in achingly lovely papery stop-motion, as if they’d stepped straight out of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s own illustrations.⁴ Indeed, the bits of the film that are drawn directly from the novel are very true to it. The framing device, however, makes some very major changes indeed. I surely hardly need state that an onslaught of spoilers is approaching.

At the very end of the novel, the little prince arranges for a venomous snake to bite him, because, he says, he needs to return to his planet to take care of the (anthropomorphised) rose he left there, and his physical body is too heavy for him to take it on the journey with him. Upon the pilot’s expressing sorrow that he’ll never hear the little prince laugh again, the latter comforts him: “When you look at the sky at night, since I will live in one of [the stars], since I will laugh in one of them, then it will be for you as if all the stars were laughing. You will have stars that can laugh!” After a little more conversation, he slips off and has himself bitten. The narrative voice wraps things up by imploring the reader to let him know immediately if he or she should happen to be in that part of the desert and come across a small boy with golden hair who refuses to answer questions – and here endeth the book.

Not so in the Netflix adaptation. The scene in question is flashbacked to a mere halfway through the runtime, as the pilot narrates it to his new friend. “You didn’t let him go!” she exclaims. “Not to the snake!” He replies, eyes downcast, “It wasn’t my choice.” In beautiful stop-motion we see the pilot accompany the little prince to the appointed place, the snake appear out of the sand and snap at the little prince’s ankle, and the little prince himself gently fall sideways onto the sand like –

The scene is interrupted. Back in CGI-world, the little girl stares at the page of story the pilot has set before her in astonished horror. “But … but…” Her expression hardens. She sets down the manuscript and turns round in her chair so that she is no longer facing the pilot. “You said he’s up there, didn’t you?” she recalls. “Back with his rose?”

“Well…” The pilot, wrongfooted, stammers. “It is as he said,” he manages eventually. “I look at the stars and I hear him laughing.”

The little girl is not impressed. “But you don’t know for sure.”

“Well, it would comfort me very much to know for sure,” admits the pilot, “but instead,” he adds, “I choose to believe he’s up there.”

The little girl, clearly upset, grabs hold of her cuddly toy fox and hugs it close.⁵ “Is that what you want me to do when you go?” she demands. “Just look up to the stars and make-believe that you’re not gone?” The pilot has been telling her for a good while that he’s going to have to leave at some point soon, but she hasn’t managed to catch on to the death metaphor he’s employing quite as successfully as the pilot caught on to the one employed by the little prince; this very conversation, indeed, was prompted by the fact that she had brought a full suitcase and a firm intention to accompany her friend on his journey when she arrived at his house that day.

“Oh, but if you look with your heart, I’ll always be with you,” the pilot attempts to reassure her. “It’s – it’s just like I know the little prince will always be with his rose.”

“But you can’t know for sure,” repeats the little girl. Agitated, she stands. “What if he’s not back with his rose? What if he’s all grown up and alone? What if he’s lost and he’s forgotten everything?”

“Wait, wait, wait.” The pilot is incredulous at such a suggestion. “Sweetheart, the little prince will never forget. He’ll always be up there for us, to help us.”

But the pilot, as it turns out, is completely, blindly, horribly wrong. Later, he falls ill and is hospitalised, and the little girl, in deep distress that she ended up storming out of their last conversation with a declaration that she had wasted her whole summer on the pilot’s stories, decides to borrow his broken plane and go in search of the little prince, whose help she is sure will be able to save the pilot. Whether the whole subsequent adventure is a dream or not is just about left to the viewer’s interpretation, though I’d say it’s pretty heavily hinted that it isn’t. The little girl flies the plane straight out into space and successfully tracks down the little prince – and discovers that every single one of her fears has come true. The little prince isn’t back with his rose. He’s all grown up and alone. He’s lost and he’s forgotten everything.

 

The rose is the only female character in the whole of the novel, which I have to say doesn’t pay too much of a compliment to the female sex.

Of course, because it’s a lovely uplifting family-friendly film, she manages to rescue him and remind him of his real identity, and there’s then a scene where the beloved rose, now wilted and dead, is in some sense resurrected as a sunrise (the little prince was notoriously fond of sunrises, I should mention). At that point, the little girl claims that she understands now. I, though, felt none the wiser – because the fact remains that she was right. The pilot’s faith in the little prince was dismally misplaced. The little prince made a claim that he was going back to his planet to be with his rose, and he failed to make good on it. But you can’t know for sure, the little girl insisted, and she was completely vindicated. The pilot’s ‘choosing to believe’ meant absolutely nothing; it was no true reflection of reality, and the little girl was correct in calling it out as the poor, self-deluding comfort it was. What reason does she have to believe the pilot’s claim that he’ll always be with her, if even the little prince couldn’t follow through on what he planned to happen after he departed?

Perhaps I articulate these things in rather harsh terms. The reason I feel able to do so is because those of us who are trusting in Christ have a comfort of a sort that hasn’t the slightest need to be couched in unqualified ‘choosing to believe’ in order to reassure us, and next to that, anything else frankly strikes me as a total cop-out and a waste of time. The little prince made a claim about what would happen to him after his physical death, but he couldn’t follow it through. There was no way of knowing for sure that he had done what he said he would; the pilot had to ‘choose to believe’ that he had, and consequently ended up believing an utter lie. Jesus, by contrast, made a claim about what would happen to him after his physical death and followed it through precisely – and this, might I remind you, in the real world, where people don’t typically rise from the dead any more than random children from faraway planets typically show up inexplicably in deserts and have conversations with passing fauna.

Jesus repeatedly stated that he would rise again three days after he was killed,⁶ and he did. Hundreds and hundreds of people saw him alive after those three days, often in large groups and on many separate occasions,⁷ and many of them proved to be prepared to suffer and die for the sake of proclaiming his resurrection. This in the real world, where people don’t typically rise from the dead; note that Paul, in his speech to the Athenians – most of whom would have been totally clueless about the whole Messiah thing, so he had to argue from somewhere common to all human ways of understanding the world – stated the fact that Jesus had risen from the dead as the proof given by God of everything else he had said: “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent, because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed; and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.”⁸

I’m not here to do apologetics; there are better sources for that if you want them.⁹ I am here to make the point that Jesus’ resurrection is proof that he can follow through on everything he has promised. With the little prince, the pilot had no way of knowing for sure; he knew what his friend had claimed would happen after he died, but he didn’t have any evidence that it had really come to pass, and he ended up believing something that wasn’t true simply because he wanted it to be. With Jesus, we can know for sure: we know what he claimed and we know that it really did come to pass, and we know that if he could follow through on a claim as outrageous as rising from death, he can follow through on anything. We never have to worry that he’s not going to achieve what he said he would.

For this reason, we have no cause to cling to any platitude or false comfort that Jesus didn’t actually affirm. We don’t need to ‘choose to believe’ anything we don’t know for sure, and indeed it’s an affront to our Lord if we do so. We know Jesus will make good on everything he claimed – that he will be with us, that we shall be conformed to his image, that he will return to judge the world in righteousness, ¹⁰ all of it – and there’s no ground to supplement that with anything less certain. Adelphoi, let’s stand confident on the promises we have – and thank God that he grants us to know for sure.

Footnotes 

¹ It’s a 1943 novel by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and well worth a read. An English translation is available here, http://www.artandpopularculture.com/Le_petit_prince, but it doesn’t have any of the lovely pictures, so maybe you should just get hold of a hard copy: https://www.hive.co.uk/Product/Antoine-de-Saint-Exupery/The-Little-Prince/7112799. 

² Translations of the French in this paragraph, in case you need them: Le Petit Prince = The Little Prince; par conséquence = as a consequence; les grands personnes = grown-ups; les enfants = children; ce qui est essentiel est invisible aux yeux = what is essential is invisible to the eyes (one of the most famous quotations from Le Petit Prince); en français = in French; désolée = sorry. 

³ If you’re a Netflix subscriber, you can watch it here: https://www.netflix.com/watch/80057578?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C0%2C850c574d3835c2b691e40f03135c8ed2bb58de27%3A0dca7c314ce5aa2ee2b10c6aa17e1bde53030be8. 

⁴ If you happen to be a fan of said illustrations, all sorts of pleasing household items adorned with them are available from the online shop of the official Le Petit Prince website, https://www.thelittleprince.com/#, which I have to say it would have seemed pretty rude not to have linked to in one or other of my footnotes this post. 

⁵ The fox is one of the characters the little prince encountered on his travels; one of my personal favourite parts of the novel is when the fox explains the process of ‘taming’, that is, creating ties with someone so that he or she is unique in the world to you. “One runs the risk of crying a bit,” the narrator remarks, “if one allows oneself to be tamed.” One also runs the risk of crying a bit if one thinks about the concept too lingeringly. *sniffles* 

⁶ I dealt to some degree with the three occurrences of this in Mark’s gospel last month in ‘Nobody Saw That Coming’ (I’m sure you’re competent enough to find it in the box on the right if you feel so inclined); see also Matthew 12:39-40; 16:21; 17:9, 22-23; 20:17-19; 26:31-32; 27:63; Luke 9:22; 18:31-33; John 2:18-22; and I don’t think that’s even exhaustive. Granted, some of these passages refer to the same incidents, but regardless, Jesus clearly mentioned this quite a lot. 

⁷ You’ll find the relevant accounts in the last chapter or two of each gospel; 1 Corinthians 15:6 is also relevant: “Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.” Why does Paul bother to say that most of them are still alive? Why, so that the reader knows he or she can go and talk to them about it, of course. 

⁸ That’s in Acts 17: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=acts+17&version=ESVUK. My university’s Evangelical Christian Union runs an evangelistic ministry called ‘Acts 17’, https://www.exeterecu.com/get-involved-1, which, if I understand rightly, is based on verse 17: “So he reasoned … in the market-place every day with those who happened to be there.” It works particularly well given that the word translated ‘market-place’ in the ESV (ἀγορά) could also be rendered ‘forum’, which is the name of my university’s main building – which happens to have in it a shop called the Market Place. How very pleasing. 

⁹ As one example, I recently read Lee Strobel’s famous The Case for Christ, https://www.thegoodbook.co.uk/case-for-christ, in which he draws analogies between the evidence we have for the Bible’s claims about Jesus and the kind of evidence that stands up in a court of law. A pretty cracking read, I have to say, though I recall that I disagreed on one or two of the less weighty points of argumentation. 

¹⁰ See Matthew 28:20; Romans 8:29; and, well, the above Acts 17:31 will do perfectly well, for these particular promises. And if you’re objecting that it was Paul, not Jesus himself, who actually said those latter two, Adam4d has a tidy reply to that: http://adam4d.com/never-mentioned/.