What Makes Prince Charles Human?

In one of those great historical moments where even if it really didn't happen this way, it should have, it has been reported that when General Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington and the Continental Army in 1781, he ordered the British Army Band to play an old lament entitled “The World Turned Upside Down.”

The first stanza goes like this:

If buttercups buzz’d after the bee,

If boats were on land, churches on sea,

If ponies rode men and if grass ate the cows,

And cats should be chased into holes by the mouse,

If the mamas sold their babies

To the gypsies for half a crown;

If summer were spring and the other way around,

Then all the world would be upside down.

Well, tune up the band, because if recent events are any indication, the world is once again standing on its head.

Charles, Prince of Wales, recently made news with his royal visitor to our shores. Now, the prince is not the most reliable source for any kind of definitive statement on just about anything I can think of, but that's the Irish in me talking. Still, he is one day destined to be the head of the Church of England but in the interview he granted the London Telegraph he gave some rather urgent pleas for his subjects and the rest of the world to get back in touch with nature.

After describing a boyhood where he sang to seals (yes your ears did not deceive you, animals of the family phocidae that live in the ocean), Charles came up with this interesting quote. “I just think we need to remember that we are a part of nature and not apart from it, which I think has been one of the great problems of the 20th century.”

Perhaps he was thinking of the London Zoo.

This past August, the powers that be at the London Zoo, one of the oldest and most revered zoological entities in existence, opened an exhibit of a new kind of “animal,” one that can be migratory, nocturnal, diurnal, herbivore, carnivore, omnivore, and has shown over time to have some rather handy tool making capabilities that would make a bonobo Chimpanzee green with envy.

If you haven't already guessed, the London Zoo has put the species homo sapiens in an enclosure for the zoo going public.

The name of the exhibit — “Humans” — is simple enough, but the officials at the London Zoo, in the interest of public safety no doubt, could not resist adding a caveat to the exhibit banner stating: “Warning: Humans in their Natural Environment.”

In a related Associated Press article, one of the volunteers inside the exhibit waxed enthusiastic over his personal role in the undertaking and was quoted saying, “A lot of people think humans are above other animals. … When they see humans as animals, here, it kind of reminds us that we're not that special.”

Aye, there's the rub, to paraphrase another tool-using human animal (quill and parchment counts). For, if this person who is wearing swim trunks and is cavorting around a zoo enclosure in a city that was once the juggernaut of Western civilization is correct, then somebody else has got to be wrong. To quote a source greater than the Associated Press, “Then God said: ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. Let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air and cattle, and over all the animals and all the creatures that crawl on the ground” (Genesis 1:26).

Maybe there's something in the River Thames because just after the London Zoo story came an interview of the Prince of Wales on the subject of husbandry of the earth.

Somehow, I can't imagine Charles’ distant ancestor St. Edward the Confessor coming up with such a non-Christian approach to man's place in the universe. I can't even imagine his more recent ancestor George III coming up with that even while he might have been trying to make a tree the Royal Exchequer.

Yes, we are part of nature in a very real sense, as hurricane and tsunami survivors will attest, but a Christian perspective of the earth and creation just doesn't allow for this kind of cross-species parity.

Only man is created in God's image. That seems to be a radical thought these days but those who want to maintain the moral equivalence between man and all creatures God created for man to manage, do so at their peril.

For those who missed it on cable news, Bobo was a chimp who had been kept by a couple in Southern California as a pet. That is until Bobo became so large and unevenly tempered that he was wont to bite as he attempted to get in touch with his “inner ape.” When the ape relieved a neighbor of one perfectly fine opposable thumb, the couple who owned Bobo knew it was time for the chimp to take a hike.

The hike ended at some kind of halfway house for other exotic animals that were once cute and cuddly pets but now large, impressive bundles of instinct with teeth, claws, attitudes and four to five times the strength of the average occupant of the London Zoo “Human” exhibit.

One fateful day, Bobo's “parents” came for a visit. They had brought a birthday cake for the ape but unfortunately the party never got started because two other large, adult male chimpanzees had escaped from their cages in the complex and immediately attacked the couple. They only bit the thumb off the woman, but her husband was really in for it. He was savagely mauled with horrific wounds that are too grotesque to put in print here. The man survived, barely, but his quality of life is forever marginalized.

Days later, the woman, recovering from her wounds, made the mandatory appearance on the national cable news circuit. She retraced the steps of the horrific encounter with the escaped apes that set upon her and her husband. Then she recounted how her husband tried to “reason” with the two marauding apes in an attempt to ward off the attack. This poor woman with all the sincerity in the world just couldn't comprehend why these two fellow primates would not sit down and listen to “reason.”

I do hope she finds peace, but I don't know if she's ever going to comprehend that the two apes that attacked her and her husband could not be reasoned with because they had not been given that ability by God.

The attacking chimpanzees weren't good or bad; they had no pity and they had no villainy; they merely saw another male primate in their territory and did what any self respecting chimpanzee would do.

When I start to hear choruses of “The World Turned Upside Down,” I usually seek refuge in the wisdom of the late Bishop Fulton Sheen. He comes to the rescue here again of course when he wrote “Man is not a risen ape, but a fallen angel.”

You might have a hard time convincing the London Zoo inhabitants of that, and you might have a hard time convincing the London palace inhabitants of that as well; but the poor woman keeping a vigil over her seriously wounded husband might take some solace from Bishop Sheen's pronouncement.

Thus spoke the Elephant Man, “I am not an animal. I am a human being.”

Human beings have been designed for a grander purpose than merely communing with the playing surface the Almighty has provided.

To paraphrase another antidote to topsy-turviness: “Who made you? God made me. Why did God make you? To know him, love him, and be with him forever in eternity.”

Sorry Bobo, you didn't make the cut.

Robert Brennan is a television writer living in Los Angeles.