Our new King concluded his address to the nation with words from Hamlet: “May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest,” an obvious reference to the great spiritual journey his mother has now begun back to her Creator.

Shakespeare’s historical plays are a study in the meaning of kingship. They lay bare in the clearest light the kingly virtues of some rulers, and the faults of others. Like Synesius of Cyrene (373 AD – 414 AD), a Greek bishop in Libya, who preached “On Kingship” before the Byzantine Emperor, Arcadius, Shakespeare believed that “a truly religious king is a grand sight.”

There are perhaps four specific influences that have shaped the religious and spiritual development of our new King: Eastern Orthodoxy, Platonic and Neo Platonic philosophy, Anglicanism and finally his own family’s remarkable track record of service to the Church, East and West. It is not, perhaps, widely known that the King’s grandmother was an Eastern Orthodox nun, his great great aunt, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia, a catholic who converted to Orthodoxy, was canonised as a Russian Orthodox saint. 

The influence of the Eastern Orthodox faith upon HM’s spiritual development is testified to by numerous pilgrimages he has made to the monastic republic of Mount Athos. During those visits our new King often stayed at the monastery of Vatopedi, whose monastic brotherhood follow the Royal Way of Eastern Orthodox monasticism. The Royal Way provides a spiritual framework for those who seek deification, the kind of union with the divine that lies at the heart of sacred tradition across the world. The Royal Way requires its followers to die to self in order to be reborn of the spirit. It requires a capacity for self condemnation and a spirit of deep repentance.

A second influence upon the spiritual development of the King is Platonic and Neo Platonic philosophy. Obviously, that influence will have reached him through the Eastern Orthodox faith, whose liturgy, art and theology remains firmly embedded in the philosophical tradition of Plato. But HM’s founding of the Temenos Academy, whose principles include “reminding ourselves and those we teach to look up and not down,” and inculcating a “love of wisdom as the essential basis of civilisation,” testify to the influence upon the King of the Perennial Philosophy, the philosophy of Plato. 

The Perennial Philosophy was best described, perhaps, by Aldous Huxley as “the metaphysic that recognises a divine Reality substantial to the world of things and lives and minds; the psychology that finds in the soul something similar to, or even identical with divine Realty; the ethic that places man’s final end in the knowledge and transcendent Ground of all being.”

Finally, there is, of course, the influence upon HM of the Anglican faith into which he was baptised and confirmed. The King was confirmed in 1964 by Michael Ramsey, arguably the greatest Archbishop of Canterbury of the twentieth century, and for whom the future King once served at the altar. The King has been especially strident in his support for the Book of Common Prayer, and it should not be forgotten that his ancestor, King Charles I, was martyred for refusing to renege on his coronation vows, and abolish the episcopate.

Our new King’s spiritual and religious hinterland is rich. It bridges the cultural chasm that currently lies beyond East and West, and gives him the spiritual equipment with which to play a unique and important oecumenical role. It means there is the possibility of the King being able build on the work of his own dear mother who was, in so many ways, a “Queen of the world.”

In the same way that Eusebius wrote, in relation to Constantine the Great’s accession to power, of how “all things were filled with light and those who before were downcast looked at each other with smiling countenances and glad eyes,” the Day of the King’s Accession is a day of possibility.

The Byzantine Emperors were regarded as Oecumenical Emperors, monarchs whose purpose was to provide global leadership, a kind of leadership that transcends ethnic and religious differences. 

Constantine the Great’s accession to power was regarded as the moment when the world was reunited between East and West, following the crisis that descended upon the world after the end of the Pax Romana. Already, the leadership of a Russia that has long seen itself as a bridge between East and West, has reached out to our new King.

Like a certain well known brand of beer, it is clear that our new King has the potential to reach places that other leadership “brands,” particularly our increasingly lacklustre political class, cannot. Long may he reign.

The post Charles III – an oecumenical king appeared first on Catholic Herald.