The documentary film Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision has just been released on Amazon Prime after a premiere at Windsor Castle at the end of January. It is part biography, part nature film, and part something more. It uses archival footage of King Charles when Prince of Wales as well as some recent interviews with him, and there is a lot of high-quality wildlife photography. Beyond this, the film is a plea for environmental responsibility, sustainable development, and what the king calls “harmony between humanity, nature and the environment.” It is not only about the environment, then, but also about humanity. While the king’s views on the natural and built environments are well known, his views on humanity are not. What many don’t know is that these views have a religious base, and that base is not the Church of England, of which he is the head.
The closest the film gets to being explicit about the king’s views on humanity and religion is in a segment with Khaled Azzam, director of the School of Traditional Arts, which is part of the King’s Foundation. Azzam speaks of “the order of nature, that sense of unity and truth that holds the world and our existence together.”
“The order of nature”: this is one of the key phrases of Seyyed Hossein Nasr, the Iranian philosopher who has been based in America since fleeing the Islamic Revolution in Iran. As long ago as 1968, he published The Encounter of Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man, which made one of the first thinkers to find the causes of the environmental crisis in a deeper, religious crisis. Another was the American historian Lynn White, Jr., who wrote the influential paper, “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis” (1967). Where White blamed Christianity, Nasr blamed modernity; metaphysical knowledge had become lost and the sacred quality of nature forgotten. The result, wrote Nasr, was “that the harmony between man and nature has been destroyed.” This, he thought, “is a fact which most people admit. But not everyone realizes that this disequilibrium is due to the destruction of the harmony between man and God.”
It is not certain that King Charles is citing Nasr when he refers to “harmony,” but it is very likely, given that his view of harmony has emerged alongside Nasr’s as part of the broader intellectual movement of which Nasr was part and which is known to have influenced Charles.
Seyyed Hossein Nasr was one of the leading members of a philosophical and spiritual movement known as “Traditionalism,” so called not because it favoured the old-fashioned but because its founder, the French occultist René Guénon, believed in the existence of what he called a “primordial tradition”, which he saw as forming the inner or esoteric heart of the world’s many religions. It is similar in this respect to the philosophical movement known as Perennialism, which is based on a notion of a “perennial wisdom” that runs through all faiths.
This is not as strange an idea as it may seem, and was certainly not so strange in the period in which Guénon published his most important work, between 1910 and 1930. The American psychologist and philosopher William James had published The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature in 1902, arguing for the centrality of the human mystical experience to religion in general. Guénon’s primordial tradition was not the same as James’s religious experience, but the idea that there is something fundamental to human religion that lies beneath the externals of ritual and doctrine is common to both. While James taught at Harvard, Guénon moved to Cairo where he lived as a devout Muslim and a Sufi – a participant in Islam’s version of monasticism, more inclined towards mysticism than its Christian equivalent.
As Prince of Wales, the king spoke highly of Guénon, and also of the leading English Traditionalist and convert to Islam, Martin Lings, with whom he met regularly. Lings, revered among Muslims as Abū Bakr Sirāj ad-Dīn, had worked with Guénon in Cairo as a young man. Lings and Nasr were both initiated into the same Islamic Sufi order. Also associated with these circles was the English musician Sir John Tavener, another friend of the Prince of Wales, the composer of the “Song for Athene” that was performed as the coffin of Princess Diana left Westminster Abbey after her funeral. The English art historian Keith Critchlow was a Traditionalist too, and inspired by this philosophy, he founded the programme in Visual Islamic and Traditional Arts which would later become the School of Traditional Arts, now directed by Azzam and housed in the King’s Foundation.
The king’s views on the environment, the arts and religion owe much to Traditionalism, which as a philosophy as well as a network of intellectuals and artists intersected with Charles at various turns. Despite occasional rumours, he has not become Muslim but he is favourably inclined towards that religion. “Islam can teach us today a way of understanding and living in the world which Christianity itself is the poorer for having lost,” the then Prince of Wales said in a speech in Oxford in 1993. “At the heart of Islam is its preservation of an integral view of the Universe.”
There are a lot of Muslims in Finding Harmony. Charles appears to share the Traditionalist view that all religions have a common core, despite outer differences. His coronation was as multi-faith as possible. The July 2025 “Harmony Summit” he held at Highgrove honoured what most people called “Indigenous peoples,” but the king made one reference, captured in Finding Harmony, to “traditional peoples.” Traditional peoples, Guénon held, are those who have not forgotten the primordial tradition, despite modernity. The king is even reported to have a spiritual director of his own, the Archimandrite Ephraim of Vatopedi, an Orthodox monk. Orthodoxy is the favourite destination of Traditionalists after Islam; Tavener, for example, became Orthodox.
Why, if the king is so indebted to Traditionalism, does he not say so explicitly? The likely answer is that he simply believes Traditionalist ideas to be true, and sees himself as the recipient of timeless traditional wisdom, not as a participant in a modern intellectual movement that can be defined, traced and studied. He probably sees Guénon, Lings and Nasr as no more than neutral channels through which the truth has passed. Postmodernist scholars would question both the idea of neutrality and the idea of truth – but the king is no postmodernist.
It is not clear to what extent the King is a Traditionalist when it comes to politics. Guénon was not a democrat. He preferred a “traditional” social and political order where, as in the Indian caste system, everyone knew their place, and where power lay with a warrior caste under a sacred hierarchy. Guénon himself never tried to restore such a system, but some Traditionalists have, collaborating to this end with fascists and Nazis during the mid-twentieth century, with far-right terrorists in the 1970s, and with Putin’s Russia today. None of this seems to accord with what we know of the king. Though King Charles’s interventions into environmentalism are undoubtedly political, he has otherwise always followed his constitutional role and stayed out of politics proper. So, what does he really think about sacred authority? Or the caste system? We may never know to what extent his spiritual influences seep into his political outlook.
[Further reading: Rupert Murdoch’s family blood sport]
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