The Rev Dr Michael Banner

Good morning.
Desmond Morris the zoologist, tv presenter and best-selling author who died at the weekend at the age of 98, owed his fame to his book, The Naked Ape. The book was published close on 60 years ago and was a runaway success - it was translated into at least 23 languages and sold more than 20 million copies. Not everyone loved it - though controversy is never bad for sales - and Morris himself used to like to tell the tale of a heated confrontation with a group of clergyman in Canada over whether humans and/or chimpanzees possessed a soul. Morris's slogan was that 'man is a risen ape and not a fallen angel' and certain Christian groups were said to have burnt the book.
The funny thing about that slogan is that it is certainly no part of mainline Christian teaching that humans are fallen angels. The person most often thought of in such terms is the devil, and even that notion was a fringe one - ironically perhaps, some of the outliers who seem to have thought that the devil and humans might be fallen angels, such as the Cathars, were themselves burnt as heretics, with or without any books.
So if we take away the false dichotomy in Morris's slogan, we are left with the assertion that 'man is a risen ape'. But as I look around me at the world we humans are making, I'm not sure how risen we are - in fact the main problem for our self-understanding is not that Darwin and his later followers have caused us to think too little of ourselves, but that in spite of Darwin - and in fact in spite of Christian teaching too - we are still inclined to think too much of ourselves.
The most central and crucial affirmation of the myths of creation in the book of Genesis is that humans - along with everything else in the cosmos - are creatures. We talk about bringing someone who is getting a bit high and mighty down to earth - and the line in Genesis chapter 2, 'the Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground', is meant to do just that. No hint of angelic origins here - we are made from the stuff that we wash from our feet and swill down the drain. Humility - originally from the Latin, humus, for ground or earth - is the right disposition for someone who knows the stuff from which they are made.
Apes we may well be, but we are the only apes who, with an overweening sense of our own capacities lord it over each other and over the rest of the created order, bending them and it to our purposes, producing political dystopias on the one hand, and threatening environmental disaster on the other. It turns out in fact, then, that Desmond Morris was not doing us humans down, but perhaps sugaring the pill - we are not so much risen apes as fallen ones.