The Quiet Road

Blessed are the rich, for they shall inherit the earth

Matthew 5:5 | New Testament (Church of England edition, 2012)

Last night in London, police and bailiffs with the blessing of the Church of England and under orders from The City of London Corporation, evicted the Occupy protesters from the steps of St. Paul’s Cathedral. The protest camp which has been a fixture in central London for over four months sought to voice opposition to corporate greed. It was perhaps appropriate, therefore, that St. Paul’s Cathedral was the location they chose to voice that opposition. For surely there can be no greater example of the power of corporate greed to twist and pervert the society in which it manifests.

Roughly two thousand years ago, if we accept the version of history upon which the Christian Churches are based, Jesus Christ cast the money lenders and profiteers from the sacred grounds of the temple. One does not need to believe that to be historical fact to appreciate the symbolism of the story, and by extension to understand the stated values of Christianity. Personally I do not consider the bible to be a work of historical fact. However, and I really cannot stress this enough, I am not being critical when I make that judgement. Indeed, there’s a sense – and it’s a very real sense – in which I consider sacred mythopoetry, such as that found in the bible, to be more important than historical fact. It’s absolutely vital of course, to be aware of the differences between the two, but there’s no sense in which historical fact disproves or invalidates myth. They are two separate categories of knowledge and fulfil two very different functions.

Take, for example, the Christian story of The Last Supper. It is one of the most important stories in our culture (in the words of Gregory Bateson, “it’s all made of stories, you know”) and I think it is illuminating; genuinely illuminating; that even as western civilisation has lost touch with its mythology, so we have seen the destructive rise of fast food and McDonald’s culture. I’m not saying one caused the other; I’m saying that within our ecology of mind, a particular pattern is manifesting in a number of different ways. Bateson discussed the Last Supper in one of his lectures…

“Host / guest” relationships are more or less sacred all over the world, as far as I know. And are of course one of the reasons why, to go back to where we started, the bread and the wine happen to be sacred objects.

Don’t […] get it upside down. The bread and the wine are not sacred because they represent Christ’s body and blood. The bread and the wine are primarily sacred, because they are the staff of life; the staff of hospitality… of guests… of hosts… of health and all the rest of it. And so, secondarily, we equate them with Christ.

The sacredness is real. Whatever the mythology. The mythology is the poetical way of asserting the sacredness. And a very good poetical way of asserting it. But bread is sacred whether or not you accept the Christian myth. And so is wine. Unless you’re determined to eat plastic.

Gregory Bateson | Lecture on consciousness and psychopathology (approx 50 minutes in)

Anyway, my point is that there’s a whole baby/bathwater thing going on when we embrace secularism without finding an adequate replacement for those positive elements provided by our cultural mythopoetry. There’s no inherent reason for us to stop asserting the primary sacredness of bread and wine when we cease to believe in Jesus as the Son of God. Yet nonetheless, that’s precisely what we have done. And I don’t necessarily think the gains we’ve made are adequate compensation for our losses.

Worst of all though, is when the very people who have appointed themselves as guardians of our mythology are themselves its ultimate betrayers. Christ’s casting out of the money-lenders and profiteers is right up there with The Last Supper when it comes to important stories. It would be more than a little trite to suggest that Jesus was the original Occupy protester, but there are certainly parallels to be drawn. And although I have been critical of certain aspects of the Occupy Movement on this blog in the past, it’s always been constructive criticism. I very much share the majority of their goals and any critical comments from me are merely suggestions as to how I feel the movement might be more effective. Precisely because I want Occupy to be more effective.

And Jesus went into the temple of God, and cast out all them that sold and bought in the temple, and overthrew the tables of the moneychangers, and the seats of them that sold doves, And said unto them, It is written, My house shall be called the house of prayer; but ye have made it a den of thieves.

Matthew 21:12-13 | King James Version

Matthew leaves us under no illusions as to whose side Jesus would have taken in last night’s eviction. And any member of Church of England clergy who believes that Christ would have been wearing a police uniform… or even the robes of the church… is guilty of staggering self delusion. Especially when you take a look at the list of those who offer “financial support” to St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Blessed are the rich (just pretend we didn’t say that, OK?)

A few weeks ago I visited the St. Paul’s Cathedral website and clicked on a page called “Our Supporters“. The page contained a lengthy list of corporate (and other) donors… those who had made substantial (in excess of UKP £50,000) financial contributions to the Cathedral. Some time over the past few weeks someone at St. Paul’s realised that this was bad Public Relations, given that they were soon to send the police to remove people from the Cathedral steps… people who were protesting against those very corporations. And so they removed the list of donors, replacing it with a bland statement of thanks to staff members past and present.

Talk about spineless! Here we have an organisation that claims to follow the path of a man who explicitly opposed the very practices they now indulge in (inviting the money-lenders into the temple). More than that, they clearly know it, which is why they have quietly removed their donor list. Unfortunately for them they were not entirely thorough. Although they have completely purged the list from their website, it appeared on the last page of their most recent newsletter (available as a PDF file). And just in case they decide to purge that too, I have reproduced the list in full here. I have highlighted a few names that I think are particularly interesting, though the entire list makes for illuminating reading…

The Dean and Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral would like to thank all those who contributed to our £40 million campaign to conserve and restore St Paul’s Cathedral in celebration of the Cathedral’s 300th anniversary. We would specifically like to thank donors of £50,000 and over:

Robin Fleming and Family
Sir Paul and Lady Getty
The Garfield Weston Foundation
The City Bridge Trust
The St Paul’s Cathedral Trust in America
The Lennox Hannay Charitable Foundation
The Cadogan Charity
Lloyds TSB Group plc
An Independent Trust Associated with Barclays
City of London Corporation
City of London Endowment Trust
The Schroder Foundation
Goldman Sachs International
Mark Pigott OBE
The Wolfson Foundation
The Garfield Weston Trust for St Paul’s Cathedral
The Worshipful Company of Mercers
The Sunley Foundation
UBS Investment Bank
Mr Richard & Miss Clementine Hambro
McKinsey & Company
Roger Gabb
The Ernest Kleinwort Charitable Trust
CHK Charities Ltd
David Mayhew CBE
N M Rothschild & Sons Ltd
Sir Brian Williamson CBE
29th May 1961 Charitable Trust
Dr Yury Beylin
Brunswick Group
Mr and Mrs William R Miller CBE
Lennox and Wyfold Foundation
Hugh & Catherine Stevenson
Skandinaviska Enskilda Bank
Roger Carlsson
The Clothworkers’ Foundation
The Headley Trust
Nicholas Oppenheimer
Prudential Plc
Simon & Virginia Robertson
The Capital Group
Lexicon Partners
Slaughter & May
Barry Bateman
Charterhouse Capital Partners LLP
Cinven
Cognetas
Electra Partners LLP
Land Securities
Standard Chartered Plc
JP Morgan Cazenove
J.P. Morgan
Cantor Fitzgerald L.P
BGC Partners
Dulverton Trust
CMS Cameron McKenna LLP
The Freemasons’ Grand Charity
David Barnett
Len Blavatnik
Canary Wharf Group Plc
Lord Cockfield Memorial Trust
The Drapers’ Company
Man Group Plc Charitable Trust
London Stock Exchange
The Worshipful Company of Grocers
Stewart Newton
Sir David Walker
Sir Roger & Lady Gibbs
Sir Robert & Lady Finch
Peter and Stephanie Chapman
Fidelity UK Foundation
English Heritage
Wyfold Foundation
American Express
The Coutts Charitable Trust
The British Land Company Plc
HSBC Holdings Plc
Morden College
Aldgate & All Hallows Barking Exhibition Foundation
Jon B Lovelace
Richard & Ellen Sandor Family Foundation
The Scholl Foundation

And here’s the relevant page of the newsletter: