It is not every day that a king stars in an Amazon Prime documentary, and not every monarch has an all-encompassing ‘vision’ for human civilisation. But Charles III is not an ordinary king. Throughout his life, he has developed his own niche philosophy centred around the idea of ‘harmony’ – that there is an order and balance within nature towards which our own societies should strive. In 2010, he published a book of the same name with co-authors Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly, presenting harmony as a ‘new way of looking at our world’.

A new feature film, Finding Harmony: A King’s Vision, is an attempt to bring this philosophy to life. It takes the form of a biography in which Charles reflects on how he has applied it over the years, primarily during his time as the Prince of Wales. We learn of his work at home – the Duchy Organic farm at Highgrove in Gloucestershire, the restoration of Dumfries House in Scotland – and his ventures overseas, from rebuilding traditional architecture in Afghanistan, to conserving the Amazon rainforest. On the surface, Finding Harmony is a showcase of the philanthropy of the monarch as he turns 78, presumably intended to seal his legacy for future generations.

What is the ‘harmony’ that Charles has spent his life trying to find? Or, as Kate Winslet opens in her narration: ‘what is the opposite of harmony?’. ‘Disconnection’, she says, softly. Indeed, harmony derives from the ancient Greek harmonia meaning ‘to join’ – it is, as we hear most distinctly in music, the coming together of different elements as one. Through the idea of connection we are led to the more abstract premise behind the king’s harmony philosophy: if we look carefully, we will find that all of creation is connected by the same numerical patterns and ratios. There is a ‘natural mathematics’ running throughout the universe, revealing itself in the resemblances between galaxies and nautilus shells; river formations and human bronchi; the helical growth of flowers and the dances of Venus. For nature and culture to flourish, the king proclaims, we must reflect these harmonious proportions and the overall balance of nature.

It is, famously, to the environment that the king has most passionately applied the idea over the years. The documentary looks back to his early interventions in the 1970s when, he reflects, he saw the dangers of the ‘great acceleration’ of industrial modernity. With the so-called green revolution came a fatal loss of biodiversity, with pesticides isolating only one crop and squandering the rest. This, the king says, violates the ‘interconnected web’ of nature, in which diversity must flourish for the survival of the whole – something he has championed through his global environmental efforts. We also learn of his homegrown attempts to cultivate biodiversity in his garden at Highgrove, which abounds with different types of plants and potatoes.

Harmony has also been the foundation of the king’s architectural and artistic work. He led the building of Poundbury in Dorset – based on the harmonious proportions of classical architecture – and founded the King’s School of Traditional Arts, where students can practice sacred geometry through Islamic tilework, Chinese calligraphy and Orthodox icon-painting. Yet it is also, crucially, a social ideal. In one clip, we learn about another of his charities, which sends beekeepers to prisons. There they show how honey is made and how ‘all these bees work in harmony’, providing a model for the personal relationships of the prisoners when they return to the outside world. Nature has much to teach, the charity’s director says, not least the coordination of our own society and economy.

So far, so harmonious – it seems this motif alone can explain just about everything. But is harmony really all there is to human flourishing? Curiously, religion is hardly referenced in the documentary, perhaps giving the impression that the philosophy of harmony is agnostic or even a secular substitute for religion. It does begin to sound, one reviewer observes, a little ‘cultish’ at points. Viewers might also be forgiven for thinking harmony constitutes some kind of nature-worship or ‘natural religion’, given the airtime spent on the ‘indigenous wisdom’ of Amazonian tribes. At one point, Kate Winslet gestures towards the harmony ideal being ‘even spiritual’, but little is said about what this actually means. It does not seem to have anything to do with religion in the traditional sense.

This, however, could not be further from the truth. Harmony is, for the king, a deeply religious philosophy – one to which the documentary does disappointingly little justice. If we look to his speeches and the 2010 book Harmony, with co-authors Tony Juniper and Ian Skelly, we find that his vision cannot be so easily separated from his faith. For one, believing that there are fixed patterns within nature – and that these should be the blueprint for human society – only makes sense within the context of an ordered universe. That there is a ‘natural mathematics’ underpinning all of reality must point to a belief in intelligent design, and what the Ancient Greeks called teleology – an inherent purpose and direction to all created things.

In the book, Charles is explicit that it is our neglect of such an ancient, religious understanding of the universe that is really to blame for our present disharmony. Even the destruction of the environment, he explains, must be seen as a consequence of this deeper spiritual malaise: the modern crisis didn’t begin with the 20th-century industrialisation, but when the West turned its back on God. Speaking of the western doctrine of progress that came to dominate after the Enlightenment, he writes in the book:

With God separate from His Creation, humanity likewise became separate from Nature. Nature began to be seen as something outside of us. We were still a part of creation as other things were, but we were no longer creation itself.

Moreover, when Charles speaks of ‘wholeness’ and ‘interconnection’ – words that recur throughout the documentary – he does so alluding to the transcendent unity that is no other than God Himself. He affirms this in the book with monotheistic emphasis, drawing on Islamic as well as Christian theology. He explains divine unity with reference to the Islamic doctrine of tawhid, the absolute oneness of God. Charles’ understanding is not limited, though, to that of the Abrahamic religions. In the book, he also quotes a passage from the Stoic philosopher-Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius:

All things are linked with each other and bound together with a sacred bond… there is one God in the whole. There is one substance, one law and one reason common to all intelligent beings and one truth, as there must be one sort of perfection of all beings who are of the same nature and partake of the same rational power.

Harmony, then, is a vision to live by only because it reflects the eternal principles of natural law – the source of which is God. It is, there can be no doubt, a theistic philosophy.

Despite this – and the small fact that he is the Supreme Governor of the Church of England –  Charles’ faith is barely mentioned in Finding Harmony. ‘God’ does not feature in the narration even once. This is peculiar given his lifelong commitment to the public understanding of religion, as patron of the Temenos Academy – an educational charity which convenes courses on, to name just a few, Shakespeare, Vedic spirituality and the Gospel of John. The king seems to have devoted almost as much thought to how the idea of harmony relates to religion as to the environment, showing sympathy for Perennialism: a pluralistic but essentially conservative system of thought which values religious diversity because it sees traditional faiths as pointing to certain shared, eternal truths. This is not, despite the criticisms targeted at the king’s ‘defender of faiths’ stance, relativism. It does not contradict, but rather complements his Christian faith. The picture is more complicated, revealing a philosophical syncretism where his understanding of nature is joined to a monotheistic theology.

There is only one moment in the documentary where this syncretism shines through. We follow Charles through his leafy gardens at Highgrove and into the woods, to discover his personal ‘sanctuary’; a chapel inspired by the design of Orthodox churches, made of earth and straw from the estate. ‘Is this where you find your harmony?’, the cameraman asks. ‘A bit…’ the king replies. ‘Or ask for more of it.’ Immediately viewers notice that the entrance of the chapel bears an inscription from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer: ‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord.’

Solemnly, the king reads the prayer: ‘Lighten our darkness, we beseech thee, O Lord’, but he then proceeds to reflect on the ‘universal principles’ that govern the entire cosmos: ‘Our bodies are constructed around these proportionate systems, as is all the rest of nature… we are a microcosm of the macrocosm.’ In this brief moment he finally reveals his theology as one that is confidently Christian, while also embracing the timeless and natural law spoken of by the ancient philosophers such as Plato and the Stoics. In his fusion of the two, the king’s philosophy is strikingly close to that of Christian humanists of the European Renaissance, who similarly blended ancient wisdom with orthodox faith. These include the Neoplatonic Catholic thinker Marsilio Ficino – a figure the king personally references in the book.

The project of Ficino and the humanists was to reconcile Christianity with these pre-Christian ideas through the existence of a prisca theologia or ‘ancient theology’ – a timeless body of truths known to sages and prophets throughout the ages. They, too, believed that underpinning all of creation was an order discernible through human reason, known in Greek as the Logos; exactly the cosmic order of which the king speaks. That God became man does not negate the fact that the Logos or Word of God was already partially revealed in nature, as it is said in Psalm 119: ‘the Word of the Lord stands firmly in the heavens’. Rather, Christ fully reveals this law to all human beings as the embodied Word made Flesh. Such fullness, we can glean from the moment at the sanctuary, is richly present in the king’s own worldview.

Except for this moment, none of the theological depth behind the king’s idea of harmony is conveyed in the documentary. The same is true of his understanding of ‘diversity’ – a word he equally uses with precise philosophical meaning but which, inevitably, gets reduced to the secular language of ‘diversity, equity and inclusion’, or DEI. For the king, as with the Renaissance humanists, human diversity must be conceived within the context of a greater unity, which is of a transcendent source. Again, this is central to his religious pluralism – he admires other faiths not merely as a gesture of ‘inclusivity’, but because they point to the same unchanging ideals of wisdom and virtue. Diversity is not an end in itself, but a means of realising unity.

In this sense, harmony – far from being merely about ‘connection’ – can be a way of understanding precisely this relationship between unity and diversity. Is this not one of the most salient challenges of our time? We are living through a repudiation of western universalism, with the doctrines of universal equality and human rights being condemned by many on the Right as dangerous abstractions which undermine national sovereignty and social cohesion. In reaction, we are seeing an increasingly aggressive assertion of particular national, cultural and even ethnic identities, giving the impression that there is a fundamental chasm between the ideologies of ‘universalism’ and ‘particularism’; between ‘anywheres’ and ‘somewheres’. We either champion international human rights and open borders, or rigidly defend the identity and exclusivity of our own culture. The two positions are increasingly pitted against each other, as if no compromise can be sought.

Yet through his idea of harmony, Charles paves the way to a world in which we can have both. In the book, he explains that there are two dimensions to human existence: one that is universal and common to all of mankind, and one that must be particular to our specific cultural contexts. While he associates the former with the mind, he links the latter to the body, towards a paradigm which affirms both aspects of human nature. Practically, this has been reflected in his work: though he speaks of ‘universal principles’ existing at a metaphysical level, the king has also been devoted to preserving particular cultural traditions, from Islamic architecture in Kabul to Scottish dancing and bagpiping at Dumfries House. He sees no contradiction between protecting the integrity of these traditions – against the homogenising forces of globalisation – while maintaining a transcendent sense of shared civilisational values and timeless truths about nature and the human condition. This is a radical vision indeed.

As it happens, it is also a world vision that is, the Renaissance humanists would say, fit for a king. The 16th-century philosopher Jean Bodin believed that it was precisely the role of the monarch to establish harmony,  tempering oppositions between different groups in society in order to bring about concord – not by eliminating difference, but by embracing it. The sovereign is uniquely placed to do this because he is – in Bodin’s understanding, itself derived from ancient ideas – the ‘One’ above the ‘Many’ who brings unity to diversity, just as the Creator assembles the many parts of his creation within a whole. Again, this is only viable because the sovereign is accountable to God, the true source of unity.

Harmony, it turns out – in spite of its New Age connotations – is a serious worldview, which can bring out the best of both Christianity and humanism in the spirit of the Renaissance. It is cosmically optimistic in its outlook, but grounded and even parochial in practice. The Amazon Prime documentary – unsurprisingly – hardly does justice to this. But that doesn’t mean the king’s vision is not worth reflecting on; perhaps harmony really could be a new way of looking at our world.