Chapel Address

Commemoration

Chapel Address at Commemoration of Benefactors 12 March 2021 Richard Chartres, Baron Chartres, GCVO, ChStJ, PC, FSA (1965)

For so many members of Trinity, this past year has entailed isolation. I think especially of the record number of undergraduates admitted at the beginning of the academic year in 2020. Trinity is celebrated for excellence and openness but the abiding memory for many of those who have entered the Great Gate in past years is of friendships. The dedication of the College to the Sacred and Indivisible Trinity is a reminder that human beings achieve their full potential in relationships. The life turned in upon itself is impoverished. As St Anthony the Great declared “we are saved in our neighbour”.

In the compulsory Lent we have been enduring, active commemoration seems especially significant. It is certainly a good time to piece together our personal litanies of thanksgiving for our own benefactors; those who have nurtured us; those who have fed our curiosity; those who have provided examples of integrity in the search for truth; those who have given us a vision of the future to live by.

I know that I am not alone in having many members of this College in my personal litany of thanksgiving but today is a moment to remember all those who have contributed to building Trinity from its beginnings, when England was on the dim outskirts of European culture, to its privileged position now as a cross roads where men and women from nearly every country in the world can encounter one another in a common search for truth.

Contemplating our roll of benefactors, we remember a great variety of people who were not universally estimable. We are bidden “chiefly” to remember King Henry

VIII, a brilliant edition of some of our most disreputable fantasies but whom we acknowledge as our founder. While giving thanks it would be monstrous not to condemn his barbarous treatment of that great Cambridge man and founder of our neighbouring College of St John’s, Bishop John Fisher.

Then we remember both Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth who share the honour of building this chapel despite their religious differences. “The evil that men do lives after them; / The good is often interred with their bones”, but not today in our Commemoration of Benefactors.

We can be clear-eyed about the flaws of so many of those who have contributed to our story in the certain knowledge that some of our own blind spots will be obvious and properly deplored by our successors.

But we remember and give thanks. Thanksgiving is an energising and health promoting action. It helps to release us from egocentricity and open us up to a wider and more generous eco centricity. Much of what we enjoy in Trinity today comes by inheritance. By being particular and naming individual persons we encourage emulation. By saluting their generosity, we realise our own responsibilities.

There is a great debate about how we should remember the past. This is clearly not a bad thing. We cannot change the past but we are responsible for what we choose to remember and carry forward. Remembering is always a creative act; a re-interpretation rather than a reconstruction.

One of the strangest things about the practice of history in recent times has been the adoption of a morally neutral approach which has gone along with the exile of questions of what constitutes the good life from the university curriculum and even from much contemporary philosophy.

My distinguished predecessor as Bishop of London, Mandell Creighton, had previously served as Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History in this University. His reputation was consolidated with the publication of a multi-volume history of the Papacy. The Catholic historian Lord Acton, fresh from the debate over papal infallibility, protested in a letter to Creighton about the studiously nonjudgmental tone of his account of the Renaissance Popes. I believe that it was the first occasion on which the precise words “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely” were used, although the Elder Pitt said something similar. But judgements should be applied with some “discrimination” in the eighteenth-century sense of the word.

In particular we should beware the temptation to behave as if we stood on a pinnacle of unassailable virtue from which we are able to judge all other times and cultures. Commemoration should puncture self-satisfaction and nourish humility and convey a warning.

This is our tomb-sweeping day. We can all acknowledge the truth that a person with only a sense of history and no sense of destiny can be rather a tedious fellow but it is also evident that a person with a sense of destiny and no sense of history is a very dangerous fellow. Trinity was built by people who possessed both a sense of history and of destiny.

As we seek to build back better after the ravages of the COVID pandemic, there is an uncomfortable resonance in the voice of the poet Li Qingzhao as she lamented the disaster which overwhelmed the brilliant civilisation of the Northern Song. In words which have echoed down Chinese history she castigated the leaders of her own time:

“You should have been more cautious, Better educated by the past. The ancient bamboo books of history Were there for you to study. But you didn’t see … Times change, power passes: It is the pity of the world.”

We give thanks for all those who have navigated this College through the changes and chances of the past nearly five hundred years and we pray for all those who have the responsibility for the fortunes of Trinity today and in the years to come. May we all use the gifts that we have received to the profit of this House and for the honour and glory of the Sacred and Indivisible Trinity.