A Speech Delivered on the Occasion of the Visit of Pope Benedict XVI to the UK – St. Mary’s College; 17TH SEPTEMBER 2010

Holy Father and Distinguished Guests,

I am honoured to be asked to speak at this auspicious occasion today which has gathered such a distinguished audience from many faiths and backgrounds. In the Koran it is said: ’People, We created you all from a single man and a single woman, and made you into nations and tribes so that you may come to know one another.’

The individual Divine messages we have received give us the means to realise not only the purpose of our daily existence but also to fulfil our potential as human beings in eternity. These Divine messages are therefore interpreted both in terms of a moral code that allows us to interact as fellow human beings in this world; and as a series of metaphysical principles that enable us to transcend our physical state and understand our direct relationship to God.

It is thus that we can live our lives with the full knowledge that the Divine touches every aspect of our being. This intervention of the Divine in our lives expresses itself through a series of manifestations which follow a clear hierarchical structure. On the first level, which is the level of our physical existence, it places us in an environment and gives us the responsibility for its well being. On the second level it gives us a religious and moral code which binds our communities together and from which civilisations emerge. On the highest level (the level of the Spirit) it allows us the privilege of the consciousness of an absolute reality from which we come and onto which we return.

I am speaking here today amongst believers, but it is a fact that we all face a world which has mainly chosen to deny or ignore the Divine in our lives – and we are seeing everywhere around us the full consequences of that choice.

As human beings we have the free will to chose a religious life or not and to decide whether we believe in the existence of God or not; but what we cannot deny is that we all exist and can never escape from a certain order which I can only describe as the Natural Order – every day we all witness the majesty of the rising and setting sun; we are all moved by the gentle beauty of the moon and we have always structured our lives according to the cycle of the 4 seasons. This order is what binds all creation together in a harmonious whole which constantly creates realms of multiplicity from an underlying principle of unity.

And yet, this Natural Order is often interpreted simply as a cycle of existence which we need to preserve and extend for our physical wellbeing. The focus on ecology and the environment has become a religion of the modern world. Although one can never deny the need to treat the physical world responsibly; we have to realise that this ‘religion of ecology’ does not fully address the true role of man as vicegerent of God on Earth. It also does not extend the understanding of the cycle of creation into a means of fulfilling our role in eternity.

This limited understanding of our role on Earth is directly connected to the loss of the capacity to understand the language of symbolism – which is one of the fundamental means of expression of the Divine revelation. It is tragic to realise that we have simply lost the ability to understand the language that God speaks to us through his creation – ’We shall show them Our signs in every region of the earth and in themselves until it becomes clear to them that this is the Truth’

The work that we do at the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts (established a few years ago now by HRH the Prince of Wales) goes some way to regain this understanding of the language of symbolism - which leads to the consciousness of universal principles and not just historical and geographical facts. One of the main disciplines we teach is the science of geometry which we practice as a means for our students to understand God’s creative principle and its manifestation in the order of nature. I can give a brief but moving example of this understanding: we know of no two snowflakes that ever fell to the ground that are the same; yet all snowflakes originate and are held together by the order of six-fold geometry.

I would also like to stress the importance of this discipline of geometry by quoting from the Rasail of Ikhwan el Safa - who were fundamental in the transfer of platonic thought to the Islamic world in the 11th century:

‘Know oh brother that the study of sensible geometry leads to skill in all practical arts while the study of intelligible geometry leads to skill in the intellectual arts because this science is one of the gates through which we move to the knowledge of the essence of the soul and that is the root of knowledge.’

I fully believe that the true understanding of the natural order of being (and its manifestation within us as well as around us) can lead humankind today to transcend historical and geographical differences as well as individual and sometimes exclusive ownership of the Divine - and allow us to fulfil our lives as harmonious elements of the one creative order.