Napoléon Roussel: How Not to Preach
Placid
Placid is the fourth “victim” in Napoleon Roussel’s review of bad preachers. Placid distrusts reason, and so he stops at the letter of the biblical text. His sermons are long chains of biblical passages linked by keywords.
“… his quotes are not linked by meaning, nor by orientation, but by words. He adds threads of all colours, lengths and diameters and unrolls them over half an hour; there are certainly threads of silk and gold, but they way in which they are tied makes them lose almost all of their value. There is passage over passage, but the only one you can remember is the last.”
Roussel offers us a hilarious example of such a chain of sentences:
“Let us contemplate, says Placid, the following words of St Matthew’s Gospel: “Out of EGYPT I called my son.” My brethren, EGYPT is the world – in Revelation it is called BABYLON: the city the spiritual name of which is Sodom and Gomorrah, where OUR LORD has been crucified; because, as St Paul says to the Corinthians, OUR LORD was delivered for our offences, and raised again for our JUSTIFICATION; and you know that the same apostle also declared: “No one will BE JUSTIFIED by the works of the LAW.” Indeed the LAW provides the knowledge of SIN, and the wages of SIN is DEATH, ETERNAL DEATH; because there is ETERNAL DEATH just as there is ETERNAL LIFE. According to this declaration, some will go to ETERNAL LIFE and the others to the eternal file, the fire that is said never to be quenched, and the WORM that never dies; the WORM that never dies is the snake, it is SATAN, and SATAN means slanderer, LIAR; no doubt because the snake LIED to Eve when it said: “Surely, you will not die, but you will be like gods.”
Obviously, as the preacher jumps from one subject to the other, without any clear idea of where he is going, the listeners have a hard time following him. The speech ends, not because the subject has been treated but because time has run out.
It is true that Placid’s words are biblical, but his style is not, because the biblical authors take their words, images and language from the context of their time; they “use the objects their listeners have before them or in their hands. One may assume that, according to the same rule, Jesus, the prophets and the apostles, if they had addressed the French or the Chinese of today, they would have spoken of opium and railways.” Consequently, using yesterday’s words and images for today’s sermons is quite contrary to what they did, it amounts to “keeping their dead letter and killing their spirit, adding the difficulty of understanding the unknown illustration to the difficulty of understanding what is illustrated, and thus suggesting false ideas or disheartening the listeners.”
Roussel thinks that one should not cite the Bible too often, but say things in good French, using a style that is both popular and modern, and insert a Bible word from time to time, which will draw attention to it. An excessive number of Bible citations will have the opposite effect.
The author is of the opinion that Placid’s lack of method expresses his intellectual laziness; by stringing together ready-made sentences he wishes to be considered profound by those who do not understand this language, and make an impression of godliness.
Placid may bore his auditory and, which is even more problematic, turn people away from the Gospel. Roussel concludes:
“The wisdom of God appears to be foolishness to natural man; there is no need to present it in a strange way. You’d better put some work into explaining things in a simple style, in the style that you and everybody else uses every day!”
Back to chapter 3 (Cyril) - Go to chapter 5 (Callistus)
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