Philip wasn’t a deity but we can learn something from his approach to God
WOE is me! – or, in Latin, “Vae! I think I am becoming a god”, as Vespasian said before handing in his dinner pail in 79AD, a year otherwise notable for the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii shortly afterwards.
Like so many emperors, he’d been inclined in that direction long before his death. When he gained the throne ten years earlier, while in Egypt running the army, he deliberately started rumours that he was a divine figure who could heal the sick.
It was a period of Messianic fervour (about three decades after Christ), with a rebellion going on in Judea, and while Vespasian was happy to sign up for temples to safely absent gods – he gave his patronage to a lot of Egyptian ones – he was less tolerant of any religion that posed a threat to his authority.
He not only oversaw the destruction of the Jewish temple at Jerusalem (his son commanded the troops), for good measure he gave orders that all descendants of King David, of whom Jesus had been one, should be hunted down and executed. Given his record, it’s a wonder he waited so long to announce his own divinity.
The Greeks had a word for it, naturally: apotheosis, which, though we use it casually to mean the fulfillment of anything (the apo- part), is literally completion of godhood. Their own rulers went in for it a bit. Alexander the Great’s father, Philip of Macedon, seems to have been the first to have stuck himself in the metaphorical pantheon (the literal one was built a few years before Vespasian’s rule then, a few years after, rebuilt as the one that still stands in Rome) by declaring himself god at his wedding.
Some 23 centuries later, another royal Greek called Philip joined the select club of people who get deified. The late Duke of Edinburgh was revered as a god by the inhabitants of two villages on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu, a role he accepted tactfully – not something he invariably managed with foreigners. He drank kava with them on a visit to the New Hebrides (as it then was) in the
1970s, and sent his worshippers a picture of himself holding their ceremonial staff.
It’s probably difficult to avoid religion if your wife is Supreme Governor of the Church of England and, though just an ordinary member of the Church of Scotland, required
to uphold it, too, under terms set by the Act of Union.
But the Duke’s mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg (or, if you prefer, Princess Andrew of Greece), had a fervent commitment, too. Early in her life in exile, that manifested itself as mania: she thought she was receiving messages from Christ and Buddha, and claimed to have healing powers. After recovering, she remained more conventionally devout, giving away most of her possessions and working with the poor.
During the war she sheltered a Jewish family from the Nazis and after it she set up an order of Greek Orthodox nuns. She attended the Coronation in 1953 wearing a habit and wimple, though her vocation did not stop her from smoking and playing canasta. One of Prince Philip’s great-aunts, near whose grave on the Mount of Olives his mother was eventually buried, went one better, and is actually a saint in the Russian Orthodox church.
So it is no surprise Prince Philip took the idea of god, even the exotic, personalised conception of god held by the Pacific islanders, seriously; even if he didn’t take seriously the idea that he was himself god. It got remarkably little attention in the acres of coverage of his death, but one of his abiding interests – along with environmentalism, technology and science – was faith, and he seems to have approached it the same inquisitive manner as he did those other spheres of human inquiry.
By temperament, he was interested in how things worked, and applied that as much to spiritual matters as to conservation and stewardship of the natural world, which was in some senses a result of his Christian faith.
He was an early and long-standing supporter of the Templeton Prize for religion, which he presented, and set up a sort of theological think-tank in St George’s House at Windsor, with its Dean. It was designed to bring together clerics, politicians and scholars from a number of disciplines in order to increase shared understanding.
The Duke thought that would be valuable because he believed that to understand more about the laws of physics or developments in biology or anything else the sciences concern themselves with was merely a different way of understanding the world God (the real one) made, and its purpose. Though he seems to have possessed this instinct to a peculiar degree, it is an attitude much more common among religious people than some militant atheists – such as their leading gunslinger, Professor (Clint) Richard Dawkins – seem to imagine.
The other day he popped up again on Twitter taking potshots at transubstantiation as “madness”, and rather inconsistently claiming that most Catholics don’t believe it. But he seemed unaware that they don’t believe in it the way he described it because he misrepresented it. In fact, this is true of most of his complaints about religion, which generally target religious people for holding beliefs that they quite often don’t hold.
It seems odd for the sometime professor for the public understanding of science not to grasp that science, though it deals with establishing truths, is not an exclusive way of seeing the world.
You can describe the chemical composition or physical properties of a painting, but you can also describe it in terms of its beauty, the effectiveness of it as a narrative, or an allegory, or its emotional effect. An interest in zygotes shouldn’t prelude an interest in moral principles, or love, or whether things have purpose.
Prince Philip’s view that science and religion are different ways of describing and understanding the world, and that each might help us get a better grasp of the other, seems rather more sensible than an insistence that one is nonsense and the other is all there is. Perhaps that is why there are no tribes that worship Professor Dawkins.
Prince Philip took the idea of god seriously even if he didn’t take seriously the idea that he was himself god