Did you know that today, right now, Nigeria and Angola sell more oil to the United States than Kuwait? Weird, right? Did you know that as of this moment, nearly 80% of all coltan is mined in Africa, 30% of it coming from Mozambique and Rwanda, often via war torn Congo? Coltan is the key ingredient in the micro-circuitry of cell phones and laptops. It keeps the current flowing and your devices working. It’s the stuff the New World is made of.
Companies like Apple, Samsung, Sony and Microsoft get more than half of all their coltan from nations that rest far below the world’s poverty line. Mozambique has numerous coltan mines and remains the sixth poorest country in the world. The Congo often comes in at number one for coltan production, while routinely appearing last on the world’s wealthiest nations list. All of this begs a question: Are these nations being exploited by large multinational corporations?
I think the answer is found in the word company.
The word comes from the Latin words cum and panis. Panis is the word for bread, and cum is simply “together with.” Our word company literally means “together with bread.” This makes sense, of course. Companies are made up of people who break bread together. Maybe they break bread over lunch, or at a conference, or perhaps even at home after making friends on the job. We break bread together when we work together. Or at least we should. It makes us human. Cum-panis.
Let’s take a look at some of the oldest companies in the world as a way to investigate this bread-breaking phenomenon.
Kongo Gumi, established in 578 AD, in Osaka Japan, is the oldest, continually operating company in the world. Kongo Gumi was founded by an immigrant, who was commissioned by Prince Shotoku to build the Shitennō-ji Buddhist temple. This construction company had operated for more than 1,400 years until 2006. In that year Kongo Gumi became a subsidiary of Takamatsu. Before the merger, it employed over 100 individuals and had an annual budget of around $70 million.
Depending how you date these things, the second oldest company in the world is Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, a hot spring hotel in Hayakawa, Japan. It was founded in 705 AD. This 37-room hotel has been managed for over 1,300 years by the same family.
What about in Europe? The fourth oldest company in the world, and the oldest company in all of Europe is the Staffelter Hof, situated in the small town of Kröv, in Rhineland-Palatinate of Germany. This winery was started by monks circa 862 AD. The land for this abbey was donated by Carolingian royalty as a way to create sustainable income for their favorite monastery. The monks of Staffelter Hof kept this business running for 1,000 years until in 1804 Bonaparte and his Napoleonic codes made it impossible for monks to own land as they always had. These new New World laws facilitated the sale of the winery to a guy named Peter Schneiders. His family has owned it ever since.
Can you see a deep-seated familial root growing through the ages, a type of handed-down tradition that nourishes and feeds these age-old cum-panis productions?
I can.
At first, the New World revolutions in England and France and the United States encouraged such family style businesses, creating a boom of small family-owned entities, many of them made in the image of the companies I’ve cited above. For many New World businesses of the 19th and 20th centuries, bread breaking was an essential indicator of success. An argument could be made that it was the key indicator for a successful company.
But what happens when success and “the good” become inseparable from material success? What happens when bread breakers become surrounded on all sides by bread hoarders? What happens when New World anthropologies lose their connection to Old World theanthropologies? In short, what happens when the present life becomes the only life worth worrying about?
Families begin to fail. Cum-panis becomes “just business.” That’s what happens.
Family-owned businesses take a hit when Light People start laying down a new human anthropology. Origin stories that make men into monkeys create fissures in the Old World pillars of cum-panis. The Kongo Gumi family gets eaten up around 2006 by an international conglomerate, Takamatsu. Big and strong is better than small and nimble. The monks making wine in the Rhineland get evicted because Light Man extraordinaire, Napoleon, rewrites laws to cut out idle men praying to ineffectual gods. Those kinds of company men aren’t exactly hot investment properties for utopian world-builders.
As markets expanded after Columbus, and as the marketplace itself became synonymous with “the good”, a desperate kind of merchant morality was born, the kind that made freedom synonymous with the free market. In the furnace of enlightened economics, wealth became co-mingled with divine ascent. Being blessed and becoming rich morphed into something like a telos. Innovative theologies like those of Russell Conwell and his Gospel of Wealth sent words like this into the Light People ether:
[Mr. Rockefeller is spoken against] because he has gotten ahead of us… We always do that to the man who gets ahead of us. Why, the man you are criticizing has one hundred million dollars, and you have fifty cents, and [I say] both of you have just what you are worth.
And Conwell, the founder of Temple University, was not alone. Fifty years before Conwell, Christians like Thomas P. Hunt were publishing books with titles like The Book of Wealth; In Which It Is Proved from the Bible That It Is the Duty of Every Man to Become Rich. By the 1900s the Gospel of Wealth was becoming, well, the gospel. Christians like John G. Cawelti published Apostles of the Self-Made Man, while Richard M. Huber decided to name his successful foray into Christianity and the marketplace The American Idea of Success.
By the early 20th Century the marketplace had become a tool for measuring Christian success in this world. The idea had become so ubiquitous that the famous sociologist Max Weber decided to write a book about it. The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism revealed a uniquely New World way of understanding “blessings” from God. The basic gist? Here’s what William Lawrence, the Episcopal bishop of Massachusetts (1921-1945) wrote publicly for all to see: “Godliness is in league with riches.”
Christian bread breakers, cumpanis, were becoming zero sum bread takers. In ways not seen before, Protestant American culture began to sanction bread taking as a form of bread breaking. In fact, they had begun to tell the story that gathering wealth unto oneself was the same as sharing it with others.
It’s not.
The lie, however, has been baked into our New World pie. The evolutionary tale of fitness and competition has been packed and poured into Protestant individualism to form a cultural sludge that covers us all. The New World idea of what a company is has become so corrupted that even Richard Dawkins, the El Jefe of Atheism, can find heartwarming words to describe our New World deist Christianism. He said this only days ago:
I would not be happy if we lost all our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches. So, I count myself a cultural Christian. I think it would matter if we... substituted any alternative religion, that would be truly dreadful.
Richard Dawkins, though from England, has become a true New World American Christian, or as I like to say these days, a Christican. The New World has become dominated by companies that mold culture. Before the rise of the Christicans it seemed obvious that a company and their patrons should share a table, and a life, and a relationship with the community. A true cumpanis would get adopted by locals, almost against their will. A proper company doesn’t control and direct things, a proper company is invited into a community in order to share things, to commune. Even if such an approach creates less wealth.
And with that, I give you a few pictures from the new world of international businesses doing work in cultures not their own.
Do you imagine a lot of cumpanis going on in these neighborhoods?
Neither do I. In fact, as someone who works in such places, I can attest that there is very little breaking of bread between those who run the big businesses and those who work in their armed camps.
No, the truth of the matter is our Light People companies love to be a part of the emerging market as long as they don’t have to break bread with less than emerging neighborhoods.
And none of this even begins to take into account the phenomenon of online businesses where bread breaking is actually, well, impossible. People can start a business online without the expectation of meeting even one customer. How should we understand this version of the marketplace? What type of merchants are we becoming?
The Old World had a different understanding of merchants, companies and market morality. One story involves the disposition of the Qing Dynasty toward merchants circa 200 BC. In that story, the emperor found merchant morality less than compelling and rigged an elaborate ruse in order to bait merchants into coming to the capital. Once there, lots of heads rolled. In ancient China merchants were lowest on the four rungs of the ladder of social hierarchy. They were the worst class of people. This was also the case in pre-Enlightenment Europe. Mark Cartwright, a Byzantine scholar tells us, “Traders and merchants may have gotten extremely rich at times, but they were held in low esteem.” Orthodox icons often portrayed merchants as stand-ins for wealth. Here’s one from Mount Athos. The man bearing the full wrath of Michael’s fury is a wealthy merchant.
Dante does the same thing in 13th Century Italy. In his depictions of judgment, Florentine traders end up on the seventh ring of hell (there are only nine), with shiny money bags around their necks. Dante says, “Their usury and desire for quick gains [deliver them to] a rain of hellfire.” The money bags around their necks pull them to their demise.
Ouch.
Across the board you see that the Old World treats their merchant class with disdain. Where they operate they operate as minions, not as free men and women. In the Old World, the problem with merchants is that they are amoral. They don’t care about the truth either way. They care only for the utility of things.
Light People culture is the New World answer to the Old World oppression of the merchant class. The Light People revolutions of the modern age have given us merchant morality as an operating system, and that system is beginning to break down.
And so we must decide: What is a company?
Father Stephen de Young spoke at the Antiochian Orthodox men's retreat recently on this subject. His perspective was around how we have lost "community" as everyone gets farther away from creating with their own 2 hands. The church itself is where he proposed we get this back. I think of the accounts of the early Jerusalem church in Acts as an example. There is also the dynamic between companies and governments. They are symbiotic. Government provides the means for commerce - currency, laws, protections and companies provide the value to keep the government going. They are like a bear and a trainer. The bear protects the trainer and the trainer feeds the bear. Alas, as we see everyday, if the bear turns his back on the trainer the trainer will cut the bears rations and if the trainer turns his back on the bear the bear might just have the trainer for lunch.
During the last embers of the COVID era, my friends and I founded a cum-panis. Specifically, we established a cooperative in Montréal called Symbolitech because we decided that if we didn't break bread together, not much of our dying parish and dying families would be left. Not long after the beginning of our cum panis was founded, our parish and families were resurrecting; some call this miraculous, others call it the simple act of breaking bread. Communing co-relates the miraculous with the digestible, in truth, knowing is eating. When we began to eat together, we began to get to know each other. Through this, we rediscovered the simple meaning of Christian life and why so much of our Christianity has moved in the wrong direction over the last 50 years. We stopped eating together, talking to each other, and earning a living together. Our churches' togetherness vanished without us knowing why; we sensed something had gone wrong but couldn't pinpoint why.
Discovering the redemptive power of breaking bread, I've seen the revival of a parish and the radically changed lives of the members of Symbolitech. The enchantment of the Lightman and the Christian wears off like nighttime during an eclipse. The world of the Lightman, their world of liberty and market values, dies in our hearts due to tiny things that the church hasn't considered adequate evangelism tools or even discipleship. It was not by the act of establishing another think tank or another Christian college. Since the beginning of the 20th century, never have Christians been more economically productive, we've written thousands of books per year, we have more money than we've ever had, we have more TV channels than ever before, universal presence on the internet and yet it has not saved the west because we neglected the more important thing – breaking bread. So, our efforts in the cultural war failed because we ignored the mystery of dining together. It didn't take much to defeat satan, but it does take the right little thing, like David's pebble in his slingshot.
There are undoubtedly giants before us, and we are surrounded by them all day. But they will not be defeated with 50 million dollar college campuses or Hollywood productions or by perfecting the education of Christians with doctorates and other degrees. Give me the breadcrumbs, and I will show you the gates of hell prevailed.
We started our cooperative to prove precisely this; all you need is the bread and wine for good measure, and the rest will follow. Yes, there is a business plan, and yes, there are a lot of websites to build, marketing campaigns to design and many bureaucratic back and forths; there is no isolation from the world in what we are doing. On the contrary, it was that much more present within it. Every day is a dance with challenges that move us towards a mission imbued with meaning. We no longer see our communities predestined to be secularism consumption of our souls; there is no inevitable decline. The world of the Lightman looks to us much like the people in Isaiah's vision who pondered satan's demise.
"Is this the man who shook the earth
and made kingdoms tremble,
the man who made the world a wilderness,
who overthrew its cities
and would not let his captives go home?"
More people will be leaving the technocratic babble of the Lightman and turning back to bread and wine. Secularism is fatiguing; it makes way too much noise. Cum panis is the way of the future, and we're already seeing its fruits.
Excellent article that shines light on the real solution.