Frithjof Schuon ( SHOO-on; German: [ˈfʁɪtjɔf ˈʃuːɔn]; 18 June 1907 – 5 May 1998) was a Swiss philosopher and spiritual leader, belonging to the Traditionalist School of Perennialism. He was the author of more than twenty works in French on metaphysics, spirituality, religion, anthropology, and art. He was also a painter and a poet.
With René Guénon and Ananda Coomaraswamy, Schuon was one of the major 20th-century representatives of the philosophia perennis. Like them, he affirmed the reality of an absolute Principle – God – from which the universe emanates, and maintained that all divine revelations, despite their differences, possess a common essence: one and the same Truth. He also shared with them the certitude that man is potentially capable of supra-rational knowledge, and undertook a sustained critique of the modern mentality severed, according to him, from its traditional roots. Following Plato, Plotinus, Adi Shankara, Meister Eckhart, Ibn Arabī, and other metaphysicians, Schuon sought to affirm the metaphysical unity between the Principle and its manifestation.
Initiated by Sheikh Ahmad al-Alawī into the Sufi Shādhilī order, he founded the Tarīqa Maryamiyya. His writings emphasize the universality of metaphysical doctrine, along with the necessity of practicing a religion; he also insists on the importance of the virtues and of beauty.
Schuon cultivated close relationships with a large number of personages of diverse religious and spiritual horizons. He had a particular interest in the traditions of the North American Plains Indians, maintaining firm friendships with a number of their leaders and being adopted into both a Lakota Sioux tribe and the Crow tribe. Having spent a large part of his life in France and Switzerland, at the age of 73 he moved to Bloomington, Indiana, where he had a community of disciples.
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Life and work
Basel, Switzerland (1907–1920)
Frithjof Schuon was born in Basel, in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, on 18 June 1907. He was the younger of the two sons of Paul Schuon and Margarete Boehler, both of whom were of German origin (the former from Swabia and the latter from Alsace). His father was a concert violinist, and the household was one in which not only music but literary and spiritual culture were present. The Schuons, themselves raised as Catholics, brought their sons up as Protestants, though not in hostility to the Catholic Church.
At primary school, Schuon met the future author Titus Burckhardt, who remained a lifelong friend. From the age of ten, he began to read the Bible, the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gītā and the Quran, as well as Plato, Emerson, Goethe and Schiller. Schuon would later say that in his early youth four things had always moved him most profoundly: "the holy, the great, the beautiful, the childlike."
France (1920–1940)
In 1920, Schuon's father died and his mother decided to return with her young sons to her family in nearby Mulhouse, France, where Schuon became a French citizen, consequent upon the Treaty of Versailles. One year later, when he was 14, he was baptized as a Catholic. In 1923 his brother entered a Trappist monastery, and Schuon left school in order to provide for the family, finding work as a textile designer.
He then began an intense study of the Bhagavad-Gītā and the Vedānta. In 1924, while still living in Mulhouse, he discovered the works of the French philosopher René Guénon, which had a significant impact on his thought, confirming the intuitions of his youth. Schuon would later say of Guénon that he was "the profound and powerful theoretician of all that he loved".
In 1930, after 18 months in Besançon on military service in the French army, Schuon settled in Paris. There he resumed his profession as a textile designer, and began to study Arabic in the local mosque school. Living in Paris also gave him the opportunity to be exposed to various forms of traditional art to a much greater degree than before, especially the arts of Asia with which he had had a deep affinity since his youth.
At the end of 1932 he completed his first book, Leitgedanken zur Urbesinnung, which would be published in 1935 and later translated into English under the title Primordial Meditation: Contemplating the Real. His desire to leave the West, whose modern values he rejected, combined with his growing interest in Islam, prompted him to go to Marseille, a port of departure for the East. There he made the acquaintance of two disciples of Sheikh Ahmad al-Alawī, a Sufi in Mostaganem, Algeria. Schuon saw the sign of his destiny in these encounters, and embarked for Algeria. In Mostaganem he entered Islam, and spent nearly four months in the Sheikh's zāwiya. The Sheikh gave him initiation and named him `Īsā Nūr ad-Dīn. However, Schuon was soon forced to return to Europe under pressure from the French colonial authorities.
Schuon did not consider his affiliation to Islam as a conversion, since he did not disavow Christianity; in each revelation he saw the expression of one and the same truth, in different forms. But for him, in the Guenonian perspective that he held at the time, Western Christianity no longer seemed to offer the possibility of following a "path of knowledge" under the guidance of a spiritual master, whereas such a path was still open within the framework of Sufism, Islamic esoterism.
Lausanne, Switzerland (1941–1980)
He settled in Lausanne, where he continued contributing to the Guénonian journal Études Traditionnelles, as he had done since 1933. In 1947, after reading Black Elk Speaks by John G. Neihardt, Schuon, who had always been interested in the North American Indians, was convinced that Black Elk knew much more about Sioux tradition than was contained in the book. He asked his American friends to seek out the old chief. Following this initiative, the ethnologist Joseph E. Brown collected from Black Elk the description of the seven Sioux rites which would form the content of The Sacred Pipe.
In 1948 Schuon published his first book in French, De l'Unité transcendante des religions. Of this book, T. S. Eliot wrote: "I have met with no more impressive work in the comparative study of Oriental and Occidental religion." All his subsequent works – more than twenty – would be written in French, apart from a major reworking in German of the text of The Transcendent Unity of Religions (Von der Inneren Einheit der Religionen), published in 1982.
In 1949 Schuon married Catherine Feer, a German Swiss with a French education who, besides being interested in religion and metaphysics, was also a painter. He received Swiss citizenship shortly after his marriage. Schuon and his wife travelled widely. Between 1950 and 1975, the couple visited Morocco about ten times, as well as numerous European countries, including Greece and Turkey, where they visited the house near Ephesus presumed to be the last home of the Virgin Mary.
In the winter of 1953, Schuon and his wife travelled to Paris to attend performances organized by a group of Crow dancers. They formed a friendship with Thomas Yellowtail, the future medicine man and Sun Dance Chief. Five years later, the Schuons visited the Brussels World's Fair, where 60 Sioux were giving performances on the theme of the Wild West. New friendships were made on this occasion also. In 1959 and again in 1963, at the invitation of their Indian friends, the Schuons traveled to the American West, where they visited various Plains tribes and had the opportunity to witness many aspects of their traditions. During the first of these visits, Schuon and his wife were adopted into the Sioux family of Chief James Red Cloud, grandson of Chief Red Cloud, and a few weeks later, at an Indian festival in Sheridan, Wyoming, they were officially received into the Sioux tribe. Schuon's writings on Native American religion and his paintings of their way of life attest to his affinity with their spiritual universe.
United States (1980–1998)
In 1980, Schuon and his wife emigrated to the United States, settling in Bloomington, Indiana, where there was already a large community of disciples. The first years in Bloomington saw the publication of a number of important works including From the Divine to the Human, To Have a Center, Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, and Roots of the Human Condition.
According to Patrick Laude, Schuon became known, through his many books, articles and letters, "as the principal spokesman of the intellectual current sometimes referred to in English speaking countries as perennialism", or the Traditionalist School. During his years in Lausanne and Bloomington he regularly received visits from "practitioners and representatives of diverse religions".
Thomas Yellowtail remained Schuon's intimate friend until his death in 1993, visiting him every year and adopting him into the Crow tribe in 1984. During these sojourns, Schuon and some of his followers organized what they called "Indian Days", in which Native American dances were performed, leading some to accuse him of practicing ritual nudity. These gatherings were understood by disciples as a sharing in Schuon's personal insights and realization, not as part of the initiatic method he transmitted, centered on Islamic prayer and the dhikr.
In 1991, following an allegation by a former follower, Schuon was indicted for "sexual battery and child molestation.” However, a few weeks later the case was dropped. The prosecutor stated that there was “not one shred of evidence” aside from the follower's testimony and that “Insofar as [Schuon] has been labeled, a miscarriage has occurred.” Despite the dismissal, the incident led some followers to leave the Maryamiyya Order and negatively affected Schuon’s reputation within Traditionalist and Sufi circles.
In 1992, at the age of 85, Schuon retired from directing the Maryamiyya order. He continued to receive visitors and maintain a correspondence with followers, scholars and readers. In the last years of his life, he wrote a major collection of over three thousand lyrical "teaching-poems" (Lehrgedichte), which combine metaphysics and spiritual counsel, as well as reminiscences of his life. Like the poems of his youth, these were written in his native German, following a series in Arabic and another in English. They are a poetic synthesis of his philosophical and spiritual message, which is articulated around four key elements: "truth, prayer, virtue and beauty". Less than two months before his death on 5 May 1998 at the age of 90, Frithjof Schuon wrote his last poem:
Views based on his written works
For Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Schuon is at once "metaphysician, theologian, traditional philosopher and logician", versed in "comparative religion", in "traditional art and civilization", as well as in "the science of man and society"; he is also known as "a critic of the modern world in not only its practical but also its philosophical and scientific aspects".
In his writings, Schuon's principal themes are "essential and hence universal metaphysics with its cosmological and anthropological ramifications, spirituality in the broadest sense, intrinsic morals and aesthetics, traditional principles and phenomena", religions and their esotericisms, sacred art.
Doctrinal foundation
The traditionalist or perennialist spiritual perspective was initially formulated in the 1920s by René Guénon and in the 1930s by Frithjof Schuon. The metaphysicians and art specialists Ananda Coomaraswamy and Titus Burckhardt also became advocates of this intellectual current. According to the perennialist writer William Stoddart, "the central idea of the perennial philosophy is that Divine Truth is one, timeless and universal, and that the different religions are but different languages expressing that one Truth" – hence the title given by Schuon to his first book in French, De l'unité transcendante des religions. For Patrick Laude, a perennialist author is "one who claims the universality and primordiality of fundamental metaphysical principles and the perennity of the wisdom that actualizes these principles in man, as expressed in all great revelations and major teachings of sages and saints throughout the ages". Schuon writes that primordial wisdom is expressed in the work of Adi Shankara, Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus and several other representatives of quintessential esoterism.
In Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, Schuon comments on the three notions of perennial philosophy (philosophia), perennial wisdom (sophia) and perennial religion (religio) to show both their concordance and their particularities: The term philosophia perennis, which appeared as early as the Renaissance and was used extensively by neo-scholasticism, designates the science of the fundamental and universal ontological principles; a science that is immutable like these principles themselves, and primordial by the very fact of its universality and infallibility. We would readily use the term sophia perennis to indicate that this is not a matter of "philosophy" in the standard and approximative meaning of the word – suggesting mere mental constructions springing from ignorance, doubt, and conjectures, indeed from the taste for novelty and originality – or we could also use the term religio perennis when referring to the operative side of this wisdom, thus its mystical or initiatic aspect.
For Laude, it is not the notion of the "transcendental unity of religions" that primarily characterizes Schuon's teaching, but rather "a reformulation of the sophia perennis, or religio perennis, conceived as the conjunction of a metaphysical doctrine and a means of spiritual realization".
Schuon characterizes "pure" metaphysics as 1) "essential", i.e. "independent of all religious formulation"; 2) "primordial", namely "the truth that existed before all dogmatic formalism"; and 3) "universal", in that it "encompasses all intrinsically orthodox symbolism" and "can therefore be combined with any religious language". For him, pure metaphysics can be summarized by the following vedantic statement: Brahma satyam jagan mithyā jīvo brahmaiva nāparah (Brahman is real, the world is illusory, the individual soul is not different from Brahman).
Spiritual practice
According to the writer Ali Lakhani, "Schuon emphasizes that the meaning of life is nothing less than the quest for [...] God, [...] for the Truth that resides within each of us; [...] it is the return to the heart-consciousness of the Divine Presence." For Schuon, man is "a bridge between Earth and Heaven"; on the other hand, "the notion of the Absolute and the love of God constitute the very essence of [his] subjectivity; this subjectivity [...] is a proof both of [his] immortality and of God; [it] is, properly speaking, a theophany."
Schuon held that religious or spiritual life offers three fundamental paths, which correspond to as many human temperaments: 1) the path of action, works, asceticism, fear (the karma-mārga or karma-yoga of Hinduism); 2) the path of love, of devotion (bhakti-mārga); and 3) the path of gnosis, of unitive contemplation (jñāna-mārga); in Sufism: makhāfah, mahabbah, ma`rifah. The first two are dualistic and exoteric, and are based on revelation, whereas the path of knowledge is monistic and esoteric, and based on intellection supported by revelation. Just as the path of love cannot do without good works and reverential fear, so the esoteric or metaphysical path cannot exclude the two other modes.
According to Schuon, the path of knowledge or of gnosis, which is present at the heart of every religion, is essentially: 1) discernment between the Real and the illusory, ātmā and māyā, nirvāna and samsāra, the Absolute and the relative, God and the world; 2) concentration on the Real, and 3) intrinsic morality, virtue. This discernment would remain purely mental in the absence of concentration on the Real through rites and prayer, i.e. without an effective link with God, the Sovereign Good, based on an authentic piety and sufficient detachment from the ego and from the world. The way towards God, as Schuon states, "always involves an inversion: from outwardness one must pass to inwardness, from multiplicity to unity, from dispersion to concentration, from egoism to detachment, from passion to serenity."
Schuon emphasizes that the exoteric and esoteric rites of the religion practiced – and of that one alone – are the basis for the spiritual method. Prayer is its central element, for without it – and without divine grace – the heart cannot assimilate or realize what the mind has been able to grasp. Schuon identifies three modes of prayer: personal prayer in which the worshipper opens himself spontaneously and informally to God; canonical, impersonal prayer, prescribed by his tradition; and invocatory prayer or "prayer of the heart" (japa, dhikr), which "is already a death and a meeting with God and places us already in Eternity; it is already something of Paradise and even, in its mysterious and 'uncreated' quintessence, something of God". This form of prayer is the invocation of a divine name, a sacred formula, a mantra; it reconciles the transcendence and the immanence of Truth, because if, on the one hand, Truth transcends us infinitely, the gnostic, states Schuon, knows that it is also "inscribed in an eternal script in the very substance of [his] spirit"; God is both the highest and the deepest, and the knowledge the realized being has of God is in reality the knowledge that God has of Himself through that being.
Developments
Summarizing Schuon's thought, Seyyed Hossein Nasr states that it was in Europe, during the Renaissance, that the "modernist" or reductionist vision of the human condition and the universe took shape, before it affected the other continents a few centuries later. By reducing man more and more to his rational and animal aspects, to the detriment of his spiritual dimension and the purpose of earthly life, modernism has influenced philosophy as much as religion, science or art. According to Schuon, its main characteristics are rationalism, which denies the possibility of a supra-rational knowledge, materialism, according to which only matter gives meaning to life, psychologism, which reduces the spiritual and the intellectual to the psychic, skepticism, relativism, existentialism, individualism, progressivism, evolutionism, scientism and empiricism, without forgetting agnosticism and atheism.
Regarding modern science, in spite of the scale of its discoveries on the physical plane, Schuon reproaches it for being "a totalitarian rationalism, which eliminates both Revelation and Intellect, and at the same time a totalitarian materialism, which ignores the metaphysical relativity of matter and the world; it does not know that the supra-sensible, which is beyond space and time, is the concrete principle of the world, and that it is consequently also at the origin of that contingent and changeable coagulation called 'matter'". Thus, still according to Schuon, the contradiction of scientism is to "want to give an account of reality without the help of this initial science that is metaphysics, thus ignoring that only the science of the Absolute gives meaning and discipline to the science of the relative". This conception of a universe which ignores as much the principle of "creative emanationism" as much as that of the "hierarchy of the invisible worlds", has engendered "that most typical offspring of the modern spirit", the theory of evolution, with its corollary: the illusion of "human progress".
Schuon's criticism extends to philosophy – "the love of wisdom" – which was originally the fact of "thinking according to the immanent Intellect and not by reason alone". It "is the science of all fundamental principles". It operates with intellectual intuition – intellection – "which perceives, and not with reason alone, which concludes", hence the abyss that separates the certainty of the sage from the opinion of the modern philosopher.
For Schuon, there are ultimately only two possibilities: "integral, spiritual civilization, implying abuses and superstitions, and fragmentary, materialistic, progressivist civilization, implying – quite provisionally – certain earthly advantages, but excluding that which constitutes the sufficient reason and final end of all human existence".
Legacy
Schuon's works have had a significant impact on the Western academic study of Sufism, through their influence on Huston Smith, Seyyed Hossein Nasr and other scholars.
Works
Philosophy (translated from French)
The Transcendent Unity of Religions, Faber & Faber, 1953; revised edition, Harper & Row, 1975; introduction by Huston Smith, Quest Books, 1984, 1993
Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, Faber & Faber, 1954; Perennial Books, 1969; new translation, Perennial Books, 1987; new translation with selected letters, World Wisdom, 2007
Gnosis: Divine Wisdom, Perennial Books, 1959, 1978; revised, Perennial Books 1990; new translation with selected letters, World Wisdom, 2006
Language of the Self: Essays on the Perennial Philosophy, introduction by Venkataraman Raghavan, Ganesh Madras, 1959; Select Books Bangalore, 1998; revised and augmented, World Wisdom, 1999
Stations of Wisdom, John Murray, 1961; Perennial Books, 1980; new translation, World Wisdom, 1995, 2003
Understanding Islam, Allen & Unwin, Penguin, Unwin Hyman, Routledge, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1972, 1976, 1979, 1981, 1986, 1989, 1993; World Wisdom, 1994, 1998, 2003; new translation with selected letters, foreword by Annemarie Schimmel, World Wisdom, 2011
Light on the Ancient Worlds, Perennial Books, 1965; World Wisdom, 1984; new translation with selected letters, World Wisdom, 2006
Logic and Transcendence, Harper & Row, 1975; Perennial Books, 1984; new translation with selected letters, World Wisdom, 2009
Esoterism as Principle and as Way, Perennial Books, 1981, 1990; new translation with selected letters, World Wisdom, 2019
Sufism, Veil and Quintessence, World Wisdom, 1981; new translation with selected letters, foreword by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, World Wisdom, 2006
Poetry
The Garland, Abodes, 1994
Road to the Heart, World Wisdom, 1995
Adastra & Stella Maris, foreword by William Stoddart, bilingual, World Wisdom, 2003
Songs Without Names, Vol. I-VI, introduction by William Stoddart, foreword by Annemarie Schimmel, World Wisdom, 2006
Songs Without Names, Vol. VII-XII, introduction by William Stoddart, foreword by Annemarie Schimmel, World Wisdom, 2006
World Wheel, Vol. I-III, introduction by William Stoddart, foreword by Annemarie Schimmel, World Wisdom, 2006
World Wheel, Vol. IV-VII, introduction by William Stoddart, foreword by Annemarie Schimmel, World Wisdom, 2006
Autumn Leaves & The Ring, introduction by Patrick Laude, bilingual, World Wisdom, 2010
Sulamith, Urs Graf, 1947
Tage- und Nächtebuch, Urs Graf, 1947
Liebe / Leben / Glück / Sinn, 4 vol., Herder, 1997
Paintings
The Feathered Sun: Plains Indians in Art & Philosophy, introduction by Thomas Yellowtail, World Wisdom, 1990
Images of Primordial & Mystic Beauty: Paintings by Frithjof Schuon, Abodes/World Wisdom, 1992
Anthologies of Schuon's writings
Treasures of Buddhism (formerly In the Tracks of Buddhism, Allen & Unwin, 1968; Unwin Hyman, 1989); World Wisdom, 1993; new translation with selected letters, World Wisdom, 2018
The Essential Frithjof Schuon, edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr (formerly The Essential Writings of Frithjof Schuon, Amity House, 1986; Element Books, 1991), World Wisdom, 2005
Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, World Wisdom, 1992; new translation with selected letters, edited by Patrick Casey, World Wisdom, 2012
Songs for a Spiritual Traveler, selected poems, bilingual, World Wisdom, 2002
The Fullness of God: Frithjof Schuon on Christianity, edited by James Cutsinger, foreword by Antoine Faivre, World Wisdom, 2004
Prayer Fashions Man: Frithjof Schuon on the Spiritual Life, edited by James Cutsinger, World Wisdom, 2004
Art from the Sacred to the Profane: East and West, edited by Catherine Schuon, foreword by Keith Critchlow, World Wisdom, 2007
Splendor of the True: a Frithjof Schuon Reader, edited by James Cutsinger, foreword by Huston Smith, State University of New York Press, 2013 [6]
Towards the Essential: Letters of a Spiritual Master, edited by Thierry Béguelin, The Matheson Trust, 2021
Letters of Frithjof Schuon: Reflections on the Perennial Philosophy, edited by Michael Oren Fitzgerald, introduction by Catherine Schuon, World Wisdom, 2022
Schuon was a frequent contributor to the quarterly journal Studies in Comparative Religion (along with Guénon, Coomaraswamy, Burckhardt, Nasr, Lings, and many others) which dealt with religious symbolism and the Traditionalist perspective.