This is the full text of Rev'd Dr Allan Doig's sermon at the funeral of Simon Price at St Margaret’s Church on 23 June.

There are some people who set the tone and guide the defining character of a place, and in Lady Margaret Hall Simon was key in that, and he did it in his usual calm, quiet and firm way, and I dare say that was true in the Faculty as well. Simon was appointed in 1981, making a distinguished contribution to the Faculty, and more widely as Editor and then Chairman of the Editorial Committee of the Journal of Roman Studies. There was also, significantly, his work with Lucia on Sphakia. In College he was amongst the first male fellows. It is telling that when he announced his retirement, he was still Secretary to Governing Body, so he rarely spoke, but there was a general awareness that his pen was the gauge of the contributions to discussion. Simon had a deep-rooted wisdom. When he did set that pen down, you knew that it would be a telling intervention, giving a special focus to the matter in hand. A senior colleague summed it up: ‘in a word, exemplary’. That example will remain with us, and it is certainly with us right now, because Simon chose the contents of this service and through the readings and hymns he is guiding our thoughts at this moment, and what a wonderful and positive choice of readings and hymns it is(!), about Wisdom, Love, Might – in God, and through the incarnation for us, his children.

In the reading from Job, the price of Wisdom is found beyond compare with gold, onyx, sapphires, crystal, pearls or rubies. The value of Wisdom is beyond compare with these, and though these are the most intensely beautiful gifts of the earth, the beauty of Wisdom is in the eye of God, ‘for he looketh to the ends of the earth and seeth under the whole heaven’. Wisdom and the fullness of its beauty are ‘hid from the eyes of all living’, but in the resurrection life when we are held in the mind of God, it is there that the fullness of beauty and Wisdom will be found. All of us who have spent time with Simon in the past few years of his illness have seen his deep, yet straightforward spirituality. His calm and quiet Wisdom, and his value of and relish for life, was remarkable, and inspiring! For example, I remember Simon’s delightful speech at his retirement dinner in College. He talked about many things, family, friends, colleagues, teaching and research – all things close to his heart. We heard about a new book he had just begun for Penguin, very practically in collaboration to ensure its completion, this time with Peter Thonemann, his colleague in the Faculty who had also been his student. At the end of his speech, to demonstrate that he was feeling pretty well, he said that he had just finished chapter I, and I believe his last words were: ‘And tomorrow I start chapter II.’ He knew the value of every day of life. To our delight Simon remained in College during the next academic year, 2008/09.

Simon was also deeply practical and when I first joined Governing Body, Simon was the driving force in establishing the Development Office, essential to the future of the College. It had been Simon who took the preliminary advice and established the initial guidelines. The success of that venture can be seen in every aspect of College life, not least in being able to commission a masterplan for the site and begin filling in the necessary buildings to make the physical shape of the College reflect more clearly the size and shape of what we had become. He made a remarkable and permanent contribution to the future of Lady Margaret Hall.

For Simon though, College remained primarily about teaching, and I think the second reading about Paul teaching on the Areopagus is a slightly mischievous choice, since it brings in teaching about Greek religion and seems to have something of Simon’s style in deflating ‘superstition’, or positions that are not well-founded. My own personal memory is that when I was writing my last book, I strayed into the territory of Simon’s expertise, religions of the Roman Empire, including Christianity. With me, as with so many others, Simon was immensely generous with his time, and with one or two benevolent questions he set me on a better course and saved me from potential embarrassment over basics.

I felt particularly close to Simon, Lucia, Elisabeth and Miranda. For some years we were near neighbours, living round the corner from them in Southmore Road. The children were the same ages, and I had the privilege of baptising Miranda on 19 June 1994, the week after I baptised my youngest son. Then there was the Canadian connection. Simon was an honorary Canadian by marriage, but much better informed about Canada than I am as a Canadian by birth. He was better connected too, I would add, and from the beginning was the key member of the triumvirate running the Canada Seminar established at LMH by Sir Brian Fall.

In preaching for Simon today I am paying a great personal debt in more ways than one, because he preached a university Sermon in the Chapel of LMH on 28 October 2007, which you will know was in the early stages of his illness. It was the Ramsden Sermon, which has the prescribed subject of ‘Church Extension over the Colonies and Dependencies of the British Empire’, redefined to ‘the British Commonwealth’. I have the text of his sermon here. He began:

I specialise, among other things, in the religious history of the Roman Empire. As I imagine that this fact was known to those who invited me to give this sermon, I propose to talk mostly about Church Extension in the Roman Empire, though I will return briefly at the end to the British Empire. If this sermon were in fact the answer to an examination question, my proposed redefinition might be excessive, but at least it will allow me to play to my strengths.

Simon chose as his text – Paul addressing the Areopagus, the same as he chose for us to hear today, and one of the hymns was the Prudentius that we have just sung. I would like you to hear just a little of what he had to say about the reading; he used it to characterise the relations between Christianity and paganism (or should I say other Roman religions?), saying:

There are two strands to this story, a quieter strand and a hard-line strand, which won out in the end.

 The quieter strand is represented by the reading from the Acts of the Apostles (17:16-34), which we had a few minutes ago. ... Paul’s speech before the Council talks about seeing the altar dedicated ‘To an Unknown God’: ‘Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.’ [Paul] went on to talk about God as the creator of the world. ‘God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. “For in him we live and move and have our being” (expressions taken deliberately from the early Greek philosopher Epimenides). ... This speech was a major piece of bridge-building between significant strands between contemporary Greek thought and Christianity. Paul, in this example in what has become known as ‘natural theology’, was arguing that the Greeks had an inkling of the truth. They had some understanding which could be made deeper and more comprehensible through Christianity.

Simon contrasted this ‘quieter strand’ with a hard-line confrontational orthodoxy, and he brought that back to a consideration of Church Extension over the British Empire in the nineteenth century, where hard-line missionary orthodoxy tended to push other religions, including Hinduism and Islam, into hard-line orthodox redefinitions of themselves in response. His general conclusion was that ‘Particular historical circumstances were responsible for the dominance of the hard-line view, in both the Roman and the British Empire. Today, we need desperately to recover and to restate the quieter view, a form of ‘natural theology’ which respects the insights of other religious traditions.’

This little sketch doesn’t do justice to the erudition and subtlety of Simon’s extended argument, but I hope it encapsulates Simon as an advocate of the ‘quieter view’ in so many aspects of life. It is typical of an exemplary man who did so much of his distinguished research and writing in collaboration, who was dedicated to the personal engagement of teaching, who gave such strength to the fabric of his College community, who was never happier than in his family.

Simon taught us so much about living in relationship; that was the mainstay of his wisdom. In these last weeks Simon has been calm and at peace; he is now at rest in the Wisdom of God, who ‘understandeth the way thereof and knoweth the place thereof’.

Simon, bless you. Rest in peace, and rise in glory.

 

Related link

Obituary: Simon Price