In the weeks leading up to the coronation, 2,000 invitations landed on doormats across the UK and the wider world. Perhaps in a last few citadels of Old England they were carried into oak-panelled breakfast rooms on silver trays by liveried footmen – or perhaps not. Either way, the design of the invitation is striking and has caused a good deal of comment.
It is self-consciously old-fashioned, harking back to the Arts and Crafts movement that flourished in the late 19th century. Knowing the King’s sympathies in cultural matters, one might almost see it as a deliberate rebuke to modern abstract design, which tends to be characterised by clean lines, blocks of colour and lack of detail. The invitation is the opposite, containing lots of small and precisely crafted illustrations with natural themes – garden birds, flowers, leaves.
Most fascinating of all is the inclusion of the Green Man – a mysterious folkloric figure usually understood as representing fertility and rebirth. One well-known commentator criticised the association of such an image with a Christian ceremony like the coronation, suggesting that it was a survival from pre-Christian times, a sinister pagan interloper. In fact, there is little evidence that the Green Man is associated with the supposed “old ways” – the consensus among scholars of ancient British religion is that we can know very little for sure about such beliefs and rituals.
The real interest of the Green Man, for my money, lies in what it tells us about the King’s instincts in spiritual and metaphysical matters. As the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, he will of course be expected to follow the normal liturgies of that denomination. But there are many clues in his public statements, his actions and his book, Harmony: A New Way of Looking at Our World, that he possesses a strong mystical streak.
He has, for example, spent time on Mount Athos in Greece, home to numerous monasteries whose spiritual disciplines emphasise the contemplative life. On his Highgrove estate he has built a small chapel which apparently incorporates Orthodox influences – his late father’s family were Greek Orthodox.
It is possible to overstate the East-West divide in approaches to the faith, but it is undoubtedly true that Orthodoxy – in common with some Eastern Catholic traditions – has developed a less syllogistic method in theology. That is not to say that is irrational or anti-rational, or that is has not produced great scholars and thinkers. Rather, it is generally less interested in understanding or presenting Christianity as primarily an interlocking system of propositions.
That the King is drawn to such an approach suggests he too may be more at home with holy fools and oddball hermits and visionary icon painters than with the 1.8 million words of the Summa Theologica. The arguments and examples used in Harmony certainly support this view. The book is not a political manifesto per se, but it does offer a distinctive and coherent plan for how we ought to organise our life together. Written in 2010 in conjunction with Tony Juniper, best known for being head of Friends of the Earth, and the BBC presenter Ian Skelly, it proposes that human life should be meaningful and sustainable, and that this is achievable if we align our environments, attitudes and aspirations more closely with the underlying truth of things.
The book draws on many sources, not only Christian belief, but also the King’s studies of other religious traditions – Islam in particular – and his practical experience of restoring the gardens and grounds of Highgrove. There are reflections on how the finest architecture appeals to the human eye and the human spirit because it was informed by a deep understanding of mathematical patterns. Not simply “nice to look at”, at some fundamental level a well-proportioned building is aligned with our moral-spiritual sense of how things ought to be, and helps us feel at home in the world.
The King’s religious philosophy has been described as “perennialist”, which is to say he supposedly believes that all world religions are grounded in the same fundamental truth. This belief is compatible with conventional Christian faith, depending on what you mean by “grounded”. Importantly, however, it will almost inevitably lead to forms of mysticism, because if the outward appearance of religious ceremonies, doctrines and rituals is masking some more profound and esoteric layer of reality, then the seeker after truth must always be seeking to go beyond those appearances.
It is in this context that the King’s inclusion of the Green Man, alongside more conventional British iconography, should be viewed. The Green Man is an intrinsically enigmatic figure, with no clear origin story and no undisputed meaning. He is, to use modern academic jargon, “contested”, and he crops up in art and myth across many countries. All of which makes him an obvious choice for a monarch whose Christian faith – to borrow a phrase from the great American poet Walt Whitman – contains multitudes.
(Photo: Dietrich Krieger)
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