FRITHJOF SCHUON

Frithjof Schuon is best known as the foremost spokesman of the religio perennis and as a philosopher in the metaphysical current of Shankara and Plato. Over the past 50 years, he has written more than 20 books on metaphysical, spiritual and ethnic themes as well as having been a regular contributor to journals on comparative religion in both Europe and America. Schuon's writings have been consistently featured and reviewed in a wide range of scholarly and philosophical publications around the world, respected by both scholars and spiritual authorities.

Schuon was born in 1907 in Basle, Switzerland, on June 18, 1907. His father was a native of southern Germany, while his mother came from an Alsatian family. Schuon's father was a concert violinist, and the household was one in which not only music but literary and spiritual culture were present. Schuon lived in Basle and attended school there until the untimely death of his father, after which his mother returned with her two young sons to her family in Mulhouse, France, where Schuon was obliged to become a French citizen. Having received his earliest training in German, he received his later education in French and thus mastered both languages early in life.

From his youth, Schuon's search for metaphysical truth led him to read the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. While still living in Mulhouse, he discovered the works of the French philosopher and orientalist Rene Guenon, which served to confirm his intellectual intuitions and which provided support for the metaphysical principles he had begun to discover.

Schuon journeyed to Paris after serving for a year and a half in the French army. There he studied for a few years before undertaking a number of trips to North Africa, the Near East and India in order to contact spiritual authorities and witness traditional cultures. In Paris, he worked as a textile designer and at the same time began to study Arabic in the school of the mosque. Living in Paris also brought the opportunity to be exposed to a much greater degree than before to various forms of traditional art, especially those of Asia, with which he had had a deep affinity since his youth. This period of a growing intellectual and artistic familiarity with the traditional worlds was followed by Schuon's first visit to Algeria in 1932. It was then that he met the celebrated Shaykh Ahmad al-'Alawi. On a second trip to North Africa, in 1935, he visited Algeria and Morocco; and during 1938 and 1939, he traveled to Egypt, where he met Guenon, with whom he had been in correspondence for 20 years. In 1939, shortly after his arrival in India, the Second World War broke out, forcing him to return to Europe. After having served in the French army, and after having been made prisoner by the Germans, he sought asylum in Switzerland, which gave him nationality and was to be his home for forty years. In 1949 he married, his wife being a German Swiss with a French education who, besides having interests in religion and metaphysics, is also a gifted painter.

Following World War II, he accepted an invitation to travel to the American West, where he lived for several months among the Plains Indians, in whom he has always had a deep interest. Having received his education in France, Schuon has written all his major works in French, which began to appear in English translation in 1953. Of his first book, The Transcendent Unity of Religions (London, Faber & Faber) T.S. Eliot wrote: "I have met with no more impressive work in the comparative study of Oriental and Occidental religion."

While always continuing to write, Schuon and his wife have traveled widely. In 1959 and again in 1963, they journeyed to the American West at the invitation of friends among the Sioux and Crow Indians. In the company of their Indian friends, they visited various Plains tribes and had the opportunity to witness many aspects of their sacred traditions. Schuon and his wife were solemnly adopted into the Sioux family of James Red Cloud in 1959, and years later they were similarly adopted by the Crow medicine man and sun dance chief, Thomas Yellowtail. Schuon's writings on the central rites of Indian religion and his hauntingly beautiful paintings of their lifeways attest to his particular affinity with the spiritual universe of the Plains Indians. Other travels have included journeys to Andalusia, Morocco, and a visit in 1968 to the home of the Holy Virgin in Ephesus. In 1980, Schuon and his wife emigrated to the United States, where he continued to write until his death in 1998.

Through his many books and articles Schuon became known as the leader of the traditionalist or perennialist movement, and during his years in Switzerland he regularly received visits from well-known religious scholars and thinkers of both East and West. The traditionalist or "perennialist" perspective began to be enunciated in the West at the beginning of the twentieth century by the French philosopher Rene Guenon and by the Orientalist and Harvard professor Ananda Coomaraswamy. Fundamentally, this doctrine is the Sanatana Dharma--the "eternal religion"--of Hindu Vedantists. It was formulated in the West, in particular, by Plato, by Meister Eckhart in the Christian world, and is also to be found in Islam with Sufism. Every religion has, besides its literal meaning, an esoteric dimension, which is essential, primordial and universal. This intellectual universality is one of the hallmarks of Schuon's works, and it gives rise to many fascinating insights into not only the various spiritual traditions, but also history, science and art.

The dominant theme or principle of Schuon's writings was foreshadowed in his early encounter with a Black marabout who had accompanied some members of his Senegalese village to Switzerland in order to demonstrate their culture. When the young Schuon talked with him, the venerable old man drew a circle with radii on the ground and explained: "God is in the center, all paths lead to Him."

"He feeds my soul ... as does no other living religious writer." -- Huston Smith, author of The World's Religions

"If I were asked who is the greatest writer of our time, I would say Frithjof Schuon without hesitation." -- Martin Lings

Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts

The habitual limitations of current modern thought are quickly dispersed and the spiritual perspectives normal for mankind are clearly set forth in this, Schuon's second book. An extraordinary breadth of subjects rendered in an aphoristic style makes the wisdom of these reflections accessible to a wide range of readers. The "spiritual contours" of various traditions are seen in the light of their necessary divergences, Schuon's emphasis always being on the one hand the essential nature of things and on the other the great question of knowing what aspect of Truth or Reality it is that motivates the entire being of a given individual. For, as the author says, "metaphysical knowledge is one thing; its actualization ... quite another." Of particular interest here is a commentary on the interplay between knowledge, love and virtue in spiritual life.

Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism

"This book is a veritable summa of traditional doctrines at the heart of which stands metaphysics. It is in a sense a synthesis of the works of the author written over the past half-century and casts a light of exceptional intensity upon complex metaphysical issues, various facets of man's inner life and the spiritual significance of existence itself in relation to the Supreme Principle. [S. H. Nasr, University Professor of Islamic Studies, George Washington University]

From the Divine to the Human

. . . our position is well known: it is fundamentally that of metaphysics, and the latter is by definition universalist, "dogmatist" in the philosophical sense of the term, and traditionalist; universalist because free of all denominational formalism; "dogmatist" because far from all subjectivist relativism, we believe that knowledge exists and that it is a real and efficacious adequation and traditionalist because the traditions are there to express, in diverse ways, but unanimously, this quintessential position -- at once intellectual and spiritual -- which in the final analysis is the reason for the existence of the human spirit. [author's preface]

Esoterism As Principle and As Way

The prerogative of the human state is objectivity;the essential content of which is the Absolute. There is no knowledge without objectivity of the intelligence; there is no freedom without objectivity of the will; and there is no nobility without objectivity of the soul . . . Esoterism seeks to realize pure and direct objectvity; this is its raison d'etre. [author's preface]

BACK