Frithjof Schuon

There is one great certainty in life, and this is death; whoever really understands this certainty is already dead in this life. Man is hardly at all preoccupied with his past sufferings if his present state is happy; what is past in life, whatever its importance, no longer exists. Now everything will one day be past; this is what a man understands at the moment of death; thus the future is already part of the past. To know this is to be dead; it is to rest in peace.

But there is yet another certainty in life—whether we can have this certainty depends only on ourselves—and it is the certainty of living in the divine will; this certainty compensates for that of death and conquers it. To put it another way: when we have the certainty of being in conformity with the divine will, the certainty of death is full of sweetness. Thus the meaning of our life on earth can be reduced to two certainties: the ineluctability of our destiny and the meaning or value of our will.

We cannot avoid the meaning of life any more than we can avoid death; this great departure, which cannot have a shadow of doubt for us, proves to us that we are not free to act no matter how, that from this present moment we ought to conform to a will stronger than our own.

Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, World Wisdom, p. 226.

First of all one has to answer the question of why the painful experiences that man must undergo are called “trials”. We would reply that these experiences are trials in relation to our faith, which indicates that with regard to troubling or painful experiences we have duties resulting from our human vocation; in other words, we must prove our faith in relation to God and in relation to ourselves. In relation to God, by our intelligence, our sense of the absolute, and thus our sense of relativities and proportions; and in relation to ourselves, by our character, our resignation to destiny, our gratitude. There are in fact two ways to overcome the traces that evil, or more precisely suffering, leaves in the soul: these are, firstly, our awareness of the Sovereign Good, which coincides with our hope to the extent that this awareness penetrates us; and secondly, our acceptance of what, in religious language, is called the “will of God”; and assuredly it is a great victory over oneself to accept a destiny because it is God’s will and for no other reason.

Schuon, Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, World Wisdom, 2003, p. 215.

Beauty—even the beauty of a simple object, a modest flower, or a snowflake—suggests a whole world; it liberates, whereas ugliness as such imprisons; we say “as such” since compensations can always neutralize ugliness, even as beauty can lose all its prestige. Under normal conditions beauty evokes limitlessness as well as an equilibrium of concordant possibilities; in this way it reminds us of the Infinite and—in a more immediately tangible way—of the nobility and generosity flowing from the Infinite: a nobility that scorns and a generosity that gives unstintingly. There is nothing stingy about beauty as such; it contains neither agitation nor avarice nor constriction of any sort.

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For the man of the golden age to climb a mountain was in truth to approach the Principle; to watch a stream was to see universal Possibility at the same time as the flow of forms.

In our day to climb a mountain—and there is no longer a mountain that is the “center of the world”—is to “conquer” its summit; the ascent is no longer a spiritual act but a profanation. Man, in his aspect of human animal, makes himself God. The gates of Heaven, mysteriously present in nature, close before him.

Schuon, Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts, World Wisdom, 2007, p. 45.

“Except ye become as little children”, Christ said. What is good about the state of childhood is that the soul is still unspent: there is gratitude for even the most modest gifts of this world and life and, moreover, an unconscious but genuine trust in God. The aging person tends to see everything in relation to a whole universe; whereas when a child takes joy in a flower, only the flower is there. Both kinds of experience — for each has its justification — are joined in the spiritual person’s sense of the sacred, of the heavenly and divine archetypes.

Schuon, Letter of 11 June 1983, to Titus Burckhardt.

In Christianity (corpus mysticum) and Islam (dâr al-islâm) the theocratic essence of the imperial idea is clearly apparent; without theocracy there could be no civilization worthy of the name; so true is this that the Roman emperors, in the midst of the pagan breakup and from the time of Diocletian, felt the need to divinize themselves or allow themselves to be divinized while improperly claiming for themselves the position of conqueror of the Gauls descended from Venus.

The modern idea of “civilization” is not without a connection, historically speaking, to the traditional idea of “empire”; but the “order” has become purely human and entirely profane, as is proven in any case by the notion of “progress”, which is the very negation of any celestial origin; in fact “civilization” is merely an urban refinement within the framework of a worldly and mercantile outlook, and this explains its hostility to virgin nature as well as to religion. According to the criteria of “civilization”, the contemplative hermit—who represents human spirituality and at the same time the sanctity of virgin nature—can only be a sort of “savage”, whereas in reality he is the earthly witness of Heaven.

Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, World Wisdom, 2006, p. 2.

The man who rejects religion because, when taken literally, it sometimes seems absurd − since truths have to be selectively chosen and parceled out in a manner required by the formal crystallization and by the adaptation to an intellectually minimal collective mentality − such a man overlooks one essential thing, despite the logic of his reaction: namely, that the imagery, contradictory though it may be at first sight, nonetheless conveys information that in the final analysis is coherent and even dazzlingly evident for those who are capable of having a presentiment of it or of grasping it.

It is true that there is, a priori, a contradiction between an omniscient, omnipotent, and infinitely good God who created man without foreseeing the fall; who grants him too great a freedom with respect to his intelligence, or too small an intelligence in proportion to his freedom; who finds no other means of saving man than to sacrifice His own Son, and doing so without the immense majority of men being informed of this − and being able to be informed of it in time − when in fact this information is the conditio sine qua non of salvation; who after having powerfully revealed that He is One, waits for centuries before revealing that He is Three; who condemns man to an eternal hell for temporal faults; a God who on the one hand “wants” man not to sin, and on the other “wills” that a particular sin be committed, or who predestines man to a particular sin, on the one hand, and, on the other, punishes him for having committed it; or again, a God who gives us intelligence and then forbids us to use it, as practically every fideism would have it; and so on.

But whatever may be the contradiction between an omniscient and omnipotent God and the actions attributed to Him by scriptural symbolism and anthropomorphist, voluntaristic, and sentimental theology, there is, beyond all this imagery − whose contradictions are perfectly resolvable in metaphysics − an Intelligence, or a Power, which is fundamentally good and which − with or without predestination − is disposed to saving us from a de facto distress, on the sole condition that we resign ourselves to following its call; and this reality is a “categorical imperative” which is so to speak in the air we breathe and independent of all requirements of logic and all need for coherence.

Schuon, In the Face of the Absolute. World Wisdom. 2014, p. 4-6.

There are in man two subjects − or two subjectivities − with no common measure and with opposite tendencies, though there is also, in some respect, coincidence between the two. On the one hand, there is the anima or empirical ego, woven out of objective as well as subjective contingencies, such as memories and desires; on the other hand, there is the spiritus or pure Intelligence, whose subjectivity is rooted in the Absolute, so that it sees the empirical ego as being no more than a husk, that is, something outward and foreign to the true “my-self”, or rather “One-self”, at once transcendent and immanent.

Schuon, Form and Substance in the Religions. World Wisdom. 2002, p. 243.

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Human intelligence is essentially objective, hence total: it is capable of disinterested judgment, reasoning, assimilating and deifying meditation, with the help of grace. This attribute of objectivity also belongs to the will − it is this attribute that makes it human − and this is why our will is free, in other words capable of self-transcendence, sacrifice, and ascesis; our willing is not inspired by our desires alone, it is inspired fundamentally by the truth, which is separate from our immediate interests. Likewise for our soul, our sensibility, our capacity for loving: this capacity, being human, is by definition objective and thus disinterested in its essence or in its primordial and innocent perfection; it is capable of goodness, generosity, compassion. This means that it is capable of finding its happiness in the happiness of others, and to the detriment of its own satisfactions; likewise, it is capable of finding its happiness above itself, in its celestial personality, which is not yet completely its own. It is from this specific nature, made of totality and objectivity, that the vocation of man derives, together with his rights and his duties.

Schuon, Esoterism as Principle and as Way. World Wisdom, 2019. p. 85.

The sun, not being God, must prostrate itself every evening before the throne of Allâh; thus it is said in Islam. Similarly, Mâyâ, not being Âtmâ, can affirm itself only intermittently; the worlds spring from the divine Word and return into it.

Instability is the price of contingency; to ask why there will be an end of the world and a resurrection amounts to asking why a respiratory phase stops at a precise moment to be followed by the opposite phase, or why a wave withdraws from the shore after submerging it, or again why the drops of a fountain fall back to earth.

We are divine possibilities projected into the night of existence and diversified by reason of that very projection, as water is scattered into drops when it is launched into space and is crystallized when seized by cold. 

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Schuon, Light on the Ancient Worlds, USA, 2006, p. 79.

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