The Little Prince and the Sign of Jonah
By Micah Hogan, Seminarian at Nashotah House
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry begins with miscommunication. In the first pages, we find the narrator’s tale of his frustrated inability to communicate his fear of the boa constrictor to adults. Though the narrator’s drawn boa swallows an elephant whole, adults are not impressed. The narrator then makes visible what was hidden, the inside of the boa, in hopes of disseminating his fear. Yet even this new visibility fails in communication; the adults suggest the narrator engage himself in more productive enterprises. In short, the narrator ultimately cannot teach because the adults do not want to listen. The fault of the communication does not lie in the representation but in those who receive it.
In the first pages of The Little Prince, we are given a fundamental insight into the nature of epistemology: knowledge is only acquired in love. Despite the multiplicity of signs, belief or disbelief is ultimately founded not on conceptual clarity but on right desire. The adults could apprehend the external form of communication conceptually, but they did not want to understand the substance of what the narrator had to communicate. The adults could not receive the fear of the boa because they did not want to.
The Little Prince teaches us that the only way to affect communication through signs is through the unruly affections, which must be tamed. On his journey through the deserts of Earth, the Little Prince encounters a fox who invites the Prince to “tame” him— to create ties with him. The fox invites the little prince to come back, day after day. Through the little prince’s taming of the fox, the fox is taught to see the fields of wheat as glorious because they are the color of the prince’s hair. The little prince is also taught to see, he sees his own flower as utterly unique, despite the fact that she is utterly common. Through the act of taming, the fox is given the wheat which he interprets according to love, and the little prince is given a new way of understanding his flower. “One only understands the things that one tames” says the fox, and thus taming becomes a sign in and of itself and makes the world a world of signs.
It is just in this manner, as one who tames through presence, that Jesus manifests Himself to His people. The only sign given to Jesus’s generation is the sign of Jonah, which is the sign of the Son of Man buried in the earth for three days and three nights. Yet this sign of death, of absence, fails to communicate to those who have not been tamed. To the untamed, the death of Jesus signifies the failure of a revolutionary, not the victory of God. When Jesus calls disciples, he calls them not to come and learn, but to follow and to die, to participate in His own sign. The only sign of the Messiah is His taming. For this is the great mystery: Christ Himself is the sign of Himself, the sign of contradiction (Lk. 2:34). He is the sign which signifies Himself, the Word become flesh. And the only way to apprehend it is to enter it, “to become responsible, forever, for what has been tamed.”
For the Resurrected Lord only makes Himself visible to the disciples of the Emmaus Road once they have welcomed the stranger into their homes, and only once the sign of Jonah, the sign of the broken body, is given. We find that the only way to come and learn is to come and die.
And when we learn to come and die, the world becomes a sign of His presence and love. Because of Christ’s unique identity as sign and thing, word can find expression in flesh when the word is word of the Word, and when the flesh is the very fleshiness of Christ. But the communication of Incarnation, the Word becoming flesh, is not inevitable but must occur through taming: “When all things are subjected to Him, then the Son Himself will also be subjected to Him who put all things in subjection under Him, that God may be all in all” (1 Cor. 15:28). God’s all-in-allness in the world, the perfect identity of Expressor and expression, Creator and creation, is therefore only effected through Christ’s taming presence, whose own Incarnation hangs on Mary’s own taming: “Let it be unto me according to Thy word” (Lk. 1:38). Only once we have been tamed by Christ do the fields of wheat become a fleshy word of the Word enfleshed. We must be patient, sitting a little closer to Him everyday, observing the proper rites. And only then do the wheat fields begin to resemble the dear hair of our Prince of Peace.
Micah Hogan is a residential Middler and sacristan at Nashotah House, pursuing his MDiv as a postulant for holy orders in the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). Micah fell in love with the “elvishness” of the Anglican tradition during his first Mass his freshman year of college and has never looked back. He was confirmed a year later and began to discern a call to Holy Orders. He is a perpetual member of the Torrey Honors Institute at Biola University (Class of 2019), where he studied Theology and Great Books, in addition to spending a semester abroad studying philosophical theology at Wycliffe Hall, Oxford. Micah is primarily interested in the doctrines of creation and sexuality, the practices of hospitality, and the writing of poetry. His accomplishments include serving as theology editor for The PQ Review and co-hosting the infamous Polycarp Pajama Party of 2016.