I'll start way off the topic of this blog. I am glad that, in my youth, I spent more time with Lord of the Rings and less time with either San Antonio or James Bond than you. Why? In Sérénade pour une souris défunte the hero, a French policeman, kisses one (while dressed as a priest) and towses two other girls, married to none of them. In Lord of the Rings you have three couples in the beginning (Farmer Maggott and his wife, Tom Bombadil and Goldberry, Galadriel and Celeborn) and you get three more couples at the end : Faramir, the most sensitive of the male heroes, gets married to Eowyn, Aragorn, the most competent, to Arwen (plus an appendix just on the background to their love story) and finally Sam Gamgee, the most crucial one, gets married to Rosie Cotton.
Also, what San Antonio does to a black man on a ship is more brutal than what heroes do even to Orcs in LotR.
But what was the connection to the theme of this blog, again?
San Antonio doesn't know English, and his English interlocutors who know some French don't know the argot of Belleville or most other finer shades of French diction. He complains that the English take everything literally. Example : a serious girl is not a girl who doesn't have her legs spread wide, it's a girl who makes no jokes. In fact, both uses exist. In a class, if you contrast "the serious girl" with "the funny girl" the former obviously doesn't joke. When a man is looking for "a serious girl" what he means is a girl who prefers family life to party life - and obviously to escapades with other guys as well.
There is no language on earth where all the speakers always take everything literally. It's just that the metaphors in common usage don't always match up between languages.
So, if you are a Frenchman, and you think "that Hans Georg has a totally English outlook, he takes everything literally, as San Antonio observed about the English," I invite you, as politely as possible, to think again. And, if on top of that you think "we French Catholics have always taken the account of the Old Testament - notably Genesis - as metaphoric rather than literal," you have a problem with your own history.
Father George Leo Haydock wrote a Bible comment, which compiled earlier commentators, both patristic and more recent. The French Dom Augustin Calmet - one of those he cites - is as literal an exponent of Old Testament Scripture as Kent Hovind. And before you think Fr. Teilhard de Chardin or his fellow Jesuit Émile Mancenot show otherwise, these two men are about a generation (or two) before the crisis of criminal abuse of minors by priests, in France. Other nation much hit by that, US, is the one that mistranslated the new Christmas proclamation from the 90's to "unknown ages" (from creation) "several thousand years" (from the Flood) when the Latin actually has "unknown centuries" and "many centuries" for the two (more compatible with traditional understanding of Biblical chronology, which obviously was traditional also in France and in the US).
Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
St. Bibiana of Rome
2.XII.2021
PS, if this should happen to be the reason behind my finding the above mentioned work on San Antonio ... such a way would have some gentle connexion to the observation made here:
This tactic has been adopted more and more by evolutionists in creation/evolution debates. Rather than risk losing more of these debates on scientific grounds, evolutionists have increasingly resorted to rattling off a stream of derisive comments against creationists, trusting there won’t be time in the debate for the creationist to show that the criticisms are invalid and still have time to detail the many flaws in the theory of evolution.
Ridicule: the lowest form of evolution
Editorial by Robert Doolan | Creation 17(2):4, March 1995
https://creation.com/ridicule-the-lowest-form-of-evolution
Same obviously applies to the arguably non-French and much less polite Shane Wilson./HGL
