Sunday, January 07, 2018

A Gentle Reminder

There is an essay attributed to Pope Francis circulating recently. He didn't write it.  I have linked it via the Snopes discussion just to make sure you don't lose your head and think it's real.

There is a whole subscene over at the Official C S Lewis FB page dealing with quotes falsely attributed to  Lewis. Quotes about peace and war get attributed to Einstein frequently. Lincoln, Churchill, and Gandhi often get their names slapped onto ideas that people want to puff up a bit and push into wider acceptance.

I find the ones attributed to Christians curious. The first sentence of "A Gentle Reminder" is "This life will go by fast." It just doesn't have the right ring to come from any pope, even this one who does sometimes utter thoughtless banalities when speaking off the cuff. (The writers over at "First Things" assure me he is better on his more careful, thought-through statements.) One of the false Lewis quote begins "You are never too old to dream a new dream..." I knew instantly that Lewis never said anything like that. Some of the fake quotes are not too far off, as CSL did write something like them. Yet some are just immediately impossible. When the quote-police (I am among them) come out, others get irritated, sometimes claiming that he might have said it somewhere that we just don't know about. Technically, yes, but really, no. There are any number of us at the site who have everything or nearly everything of Lewis's, and taken together, we would know. Also, the quote being shoved forward often has words or phrases that are clearly modern, that could not have been written before 1990.

But more than that, one can tell by some quality of the depth and the tone. There might be serious comments that would set us back for a time, because the phrasing and sentiment were possible. Yet these are seldom the issue.  The superficialities, the poorly-understood theology, the cliches are far more frequent. When people protest that this sense that frequent readers of Lewis have is not something real, it is something we are making up, I have to conclude that they don't see the difference themselves because their own understanding of Lewis, and likely of theology or even of God is superficial. Or they want following Christ to not be much of a hardship, to be a matter of cheerfulness and no sacrifice.

They really think that a Pope would write a letter to his flock telling them to "allow dogs to get closer," and to "give yourselves the pleasures you deserve."


bs king said...

I got defriended on Facebook a few years ago for pointing out to a mutual friend of ours that this was not an Abe Lincoln quote:

I looked it up because I had just finished Team of Rivals and didn't think the wording sounded right for the era. Turns out I was right, it was written about 50 years later:

james said...

Ouch, that's bad. Granted, the translations are sometimes a bit off, but that kind of advice isn't even in the same county, never mind the same ball park, as orthodox christian counsel.

Which isn't to say that it couldn't have been penned by someone with the title of christian minister, of course.

I agree, even if you don't know their whole corpus, you can often tell that some bit of writing just isn't in Lewis', or Chesterton's, or Twain's style, or not in their view of the world. They wrote to communicate their views of the world, and succeeded.

Retriever said...

I hadn't seen it. I am actually VERY glad I don't do Facebook as I miss all kinds of rubbish....

I was thinking about just this issue of mis-attributed quotes this weekend, tho, when I was on a St. Francis quote hunt (don't ask). I discovered all kinds of quotes that have been mis-attributed to him...Now, since he is my favorite Saint, I pursued....I'm still holding out for the Wolf of Gubbio story being true, tho! :)

Assistant Village Idiot said...

Yes, even Retriever, with her love of dogs, wouldn't be likely to think that the Holy Father would go out of his way to make sure we all got on board with building doggie acceptance into our lives. And I really think he would come down on "pleasures that you deserve."

I can see where St. Francis would be a magnet for whatever Gospel of Nice quotes people want to put out.

BTW, the rest of the thread was more than a bit defensive about what a great sentiment it is anyway. I refrained from further comment.

Texan99 said...

A great sentiment can stand on its own without being falsely attributed to an unimpeachable authority. I take that kind of false attribution to be more an effort to criticize Christians for for being hard-edged. "See, your own authority says the important thing in life is to be warm and fuzzy. Quit harassing us about things like chastity and abortion."

Sometimes style is completely decisive. One of C.S. Lewis's most interesting points was how his deep experience in reading myths allowed him to brush off any idea that the Gospels are myths. The style, the circumstantiality, the tone all announce in an instant that you may be reading something open to doubt, but it is decidedly not a myth. Look at the difference between any account of Jesus's actions, with the rare exception of something like the Transfiguration, and, say, Revelations, with its dreamlike, mythic, poetic style. It's the difference between a vision and an eye-witness account, even if it's a eye-witness account at some remove, and even if you think it's been embroidered or misinterpreted.

Now I happen to think you can tell a good deal about the health of someone's soul by how kind he is to a dog and how much he objectifies animals generally. But either Lewis or the Pope would know better than to advise me to put that particular virtue on a pedestal and ignore its sometimes fire-breathing source. If I'd never faced a moral dilemma more difficult than whether to be nice to a dog in a conventional way that didn't cost much, I'd have been a lucky person--or perhaps a more flaccid spirit than God hoped for when He created me.

Assistant Village Idiot said...

@ T99 - " I take that kind of false attribution to be more an effort to criticize Christians for for being hard-edged. "See, your own authority says the important thing in life is to be warm and fuzzy. Quit harassing us about things like chastity and abortion." That was my take as well, including her commenters.

They do it with Jesus as well, of course. Sometimes a misquote or false attribution, but most often a selective quoting of Him. We all do, of course, but we try to work against that and face the uncomfortable parts squarely. Lewis suggested in his Reflections on the Psalms that further learning was likely to be in precisely those places we like least.

Texan99 said...

That sword-wielding Jesus, I don't much like Him. Lamb-woolly sweet baby Jesus is more like it, meek and mild, "likes to see the young people having a good time," as Lewis said. Wasn't it Jesus who said "get your groove on"?

He had such an inconvenient habit of shattering my own idols along with those of all those other benighted people.