Prince Charles: Defender of the High Middle Ages?

Having been a little churlish about British anti-Catholicism last year on the eve of his son's wedding, I hasten to recommend this interesting piece by Rod Dreher making the case for the “revolutionary anti-modernism” of Prince Charles:

He is an anti-modernist to the marrow, which doesn’t always put him onside with the Conservative Party. Charles’s support for organic agriculture and other green causes, his sympathetic view of Islam, and his disdain for liberal economic thinking have earned him skepticism from some on the British right. (“Is Prince Charles ill-advised, or merely idiotic?” the Tory libertarian writer James Delingpole once asked in print.) And some Tories fear that the prince’s unusually forceful advocacy endangers the most traditional British institution of all: the monarchy itself.

Others, though, see in Charles a visionary of the cultural right, one whose worldview is far broader, historically and otherwise, than those of his contemporaries on either side of the political spectrum. In this reading, Charles’s thinking is not determined by post-Enlightenment categories but rather draws on older ways of seeing and understanding that conservatives ought to recover. “All in all, the criticisms of Prince Charles from self-styled ‘Tories’ show just how little they understand about the philosophy they claim to represent,” says the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton.

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The Prince of Wales says the West reached a turning point in the High Middle Ages, when integrative scholasticism gave way to nominalism and Western man began to think of God as separate from Creation and humanity distinct from nature—a point also made by the American conservative Richard Weaver in his landmark 1948 book, Ideas Have Consequences. Though Charles concedes this paradigm shift paved the way for the emergence of science, it also “effectively shattered the organic unity of reality.”

As a result, he concludes, we are living in a Faustian crisis. We have become blindly proud of our power, in thrall to the ideal of progress based on extending our mastery of the material world through science and technology. We have forgotten that we are not gods. We do not long for harmony with the natural world, including learning to live within “Nature’s necessary limits,” as Charles puts it, but rather seek to conquer Nature and to impose our own will upon it, free from any obligation beyond satisfying our own desires. And, following Faust, we are bound for destruction if we do not turn back to tradition.