The Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, gave a warning yesterday against materialist greed and prophesied the collapse of civilisation. In his Easter Day sermon at Canterbury Cathedral, Dr Williams said that the luxuries we took for granted could not be sustained for ever.

In our culture, thoughts of death were too painful to manage, he told worshippers. Criticising modern society’s approach to mortality, Dr Williams said: “Individuals live in anxious and acquisitive ways, seizing what they can to provide a security that is bound to dissolve, because they are going to die,” he said.

“Societies or nations do the same. The individual grabbing the things of this world is in fact the mark of an inner deadness.”

The denial of death was also at work in societies that assumed that there would always be enough oil, power and territory to meet their desires, Dr Williams said. “We as a culture cannot imagine that this civilisation, like all others, will collapse and that what we take for granted about our comforts and luxuries simply cannot be sustained indefinitely. To all this, the Church says sombrely, don’t be deceived: night must fall.”

Secularists have said that Christianity, in celebrating the Resurrection of Christ on Easter Day, denies the reality of death, but Dr Williams spelt out the opposite message. “Easter is not about denying death, and the Resurrection does not make the nightmare death on the Cross unreal,” he said. “Death is exactly what the artists and scientists and psychoanalysts say: it is a full stop to human growth and response, it is night falling on everything we value or understand or hope for.”

— Two men were charged yesterday with causing a disturbance in Canterbury Cathedral by protesting during the Archbishop’s sermon.

Kyle Spotswood, 26, and Sidney Cordle, 52, both of Sheffield, were arrested at 11.25am and charged under Section 2 of the 1860 Ecclesiastical Courts Jurisdiction Act, which says it is an offence to disrupt a church service. The two men will appear before Canterbury magistrates on April 7.