I am so disenchanted with modern left / right political disputes and even the idea that English and European culture can be saved by reversing the policies of mass immigration, especially of Muslims. I am not going to discuss the question, but I am aware that some are accusing King Charles III of having converted to Islam and promoted a conspiracy to destroy western culture and civilisation in favour of the richest oligarchs of this planet.
I have been shaken by the lack of culture and religion of many of our contemporaries that I wonder if it might not teach them a lesson to find themselves under a regime like Iraq with the Ayatollah or Afghanistan under the Taliban ! No, I would not seriously entertain such an idea, but divine truth and love are found beyond the exoteric religion of institutional churches, synagogues, mosques, temples or whatever. Exoteric religion is vital because we are incarnate, but we need to search for our inner and immanent divinity which is at the same time transcendent. This is not syncretism or “New Age” but a concern that political religion alone will not solve the problems in the modern world.
King Charles III is often been accused of supporting “woke” and left-wing agendas like the environment and being involved in the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset. In 1994, he suggested that when he became King, he would use the title of Defender of Faiths rather than Defender of the Faith. He was open to other faiths, especially Islam, and this caused many to accuse him of promoting secularism or syncretism, renouncing the claim of Christianity to be the one true faith. The truth is not so simple.
Charles may well be our modern-day philosopher king in the Platonic meaning of this idea. He has supported the school of thought called Perennialism holding a universal truth which is more or less present in all traditional religions. His Majesty is the patron of the Temenos Academy, dedicated to studying Perennialism. How about the idea that he not trying to secularise and destroy spiritual tradition, but to give it new life ?
I am sensitive to this subject, because I discovered a different dimension of Christianity when I was at university in Switzerland. I participated in a church history seminar on Liberalism in which the name of Félicité de Lamennais was emphasised, a view of religion and the secular state that was condemned by Gregory XVI in his encyclical Mirari Vos of 1832. Like Modernism in the 1890’s and 1900’s, the word came to describe a very wide and imprecise worldview, notably promoting ideas like the separation of Church and State and a more open theological view than Thomism. My acquiring and reading Bernard Reardon’s Religion in the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge 1985) opened a completely new view of what Catholicism meant to me. I discovered German Idealism as an alternative view of epistemology and truth as a transcendent to which the soul yearns rather than pretends to possess. Many years later, I discovered Novalis, the young man who died of TB in 1801 having lived in the Saxony part of what is now Germany. In the early 1990’s when I was still a seminarian at Gricigliano, I was introduced to an amazing man living in Paris. His name was Jean Phaure. He had been born in French Vietnam. He wrote the book Le Cycle de l’Humanité Adamique, introduction à l’étude de la cyclologie traditionnelle et de la fin du temps. He wrote many other books too. It was a great privilege to meet him and to be invited to eat Vietnamese meals as he revealed to me a whole new world. When I discovered Novalis, this pen name rang with me – we walk new paths in fidelity to the great Tradition. My love of Romanticism suddenly converged with my discovery of Perennial Traditionalism, something much deeper than simple conservatism of nineteenth and early twentieth century authoritarian Catholicism. Another author who entered my world was René Guénon.
He with Frithjof Schuon and Ananda Coomaraswamy introduced a whole new volume to the history of Romanticism reacting against materialism and the extreme rationalism of the eighteenth century. To this day, I have Guénon’s La Crise du Monde Moderne, Le Règne de la Quantité et les signes des temps (just cast your mind to Berdyaev’s The End of our Time). There is also Orient et Occident, a theme described by Vladimir Soloviev that touched the young Fribourg student to the core. I have been wary of Guénon because of his conversion to Islam, even though it was the spiritual and mystical “branch”. However, I believe that our being able to relate to Christianity can be enhanced by exposure to Sufism and Hinduism in their most subtle expressions.
Charles has expressed particular sympathy with Perennial Traditionalism. He has himself mentioned the concept of the Reign of Quantity, lamenting a world that no longer years for God. I too have been brought to a love of the sea and a concern about the amount of plastic trash finding its way there. Like Berdyaev, Guénon spoke of art and creativity as a vehicle of transcendence. Everything is converging. The Romantics loved nature and it was a part of our human inspiration. As Wordsworth wrote during his days in the Lake District, where I spent my childhood climbing the fells with my family and our inexhaustible dogs :
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Guénon brought King Charles closer to mystical Islam, where I still feel fear and recoiling. There are aspects of Islam that are forgotten in Christianity. The Quran was heavily influenced by Syrian Christianity and the polemics over Arian, Nestorian, and Monophysite Christology that tormented Christianity in these centuries. Charles believes it possible and desirable to find light in the traditions of other religions, because the same universal truth resides in them all. Would Charles like to see all religions merge together as in the view of syncretism ? His conservative critics would see a desire for a one world religion in the hands of a real-life Blofeld and SPECTRE ! This theme has emerged in the writings of dystopian novelists.
However, Perennialists, like the Romantics and Idealists before them, were highly critical of syncretism. Guénon was just as sharply critical of New Age, Theosophy and the other various groups from the late nineteenth century. I think that we can be assured that our King has no idea of rejecting Christianity and replacing it with Islam. He manifestly desires to enrich Christianity and bring life back to it after centuries of moralism, institutional hypocrisy and authoritarian overreach.
Perennialism has the ability to recognise truth, beauty and goodness in the various faiths present in Britain – at the same time as maintaining absolute truth. Others might go down the “woke” rabbit hole of inclusivity, he avoids relativism and any temptation to abandon the sacred. He might well save pre-modernity and tradition. Reading various articles and ideas about King Charles in this light of Perennialism, I am left with optimism for the future and faith in the spiritual nature of the Monarchy.
The Blue Flower 