Frithjof Schuon (1907 – 1998), a Swiss metaphysician and spiritual master of German descent, was the major representative of the Philosophia Perennis — also known as the Perennialist or Traditionalist School of thought. Other great exponentes of the Philosophia Perennis were René Guénon, Titus Burckhardt and Ananda Coomaraswamy.
Schuon was the author of more than twenty works in French on metaphysics, spirituality, the religious phenomenon, anthropology and art, which have been translated into English and many other languages. He was also a gifted painter and a poet.
In his works, 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 from its traditional roots. In the lineage of Plato, Plotinus, Adi Shankara, Meister Eckhardt, Ibn Arabî and other great metaphysicians, Schuon affirmed the metaphysical unity between the Principle and its manifestation.Initiated by Sheikh Ahmad al-Alawî into the Sufi Shâdhilî order, he founded the Tarîqa Maryamiyya. His teaching strongly emphasizes the universality of metaphysical doctrine, along with the necessity of practising one religion, and one alone; 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 emigrated to the United States.
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, who was of German origin, and Margarete Boehler, a French-speaking Alsatian. His father, an amiable and distinguished man, was a concert violinist, and the household was one in which not only music but literary and spiritual culture were present. The Schuons, though Catholics, enrolled their sons in the Lutheran catechism, the predominant denomination in Basel.
At primary school, Schuon met the future metaphysician and art specialist Titus Burckhardt, who remained a lifelong friend. From the age of ten, his search for truth led him to read not only the Bible but also the Upanishads, the Bhagavad-Gîtâ and the Koran, 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)
However, in 1920 Schuon’s father died. 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 immersed himself in the world of the Bhagavad-Gītā and the Vedānta; this call of Hinduism sustained him for ten years, though he was perfectly aware that he could not become Hindu himself. In 1924, while still living in Mulhouse, he discovered the works of the French philosopher René Guénon, which served to confirm his intellectual intuitions and provided support for the metaphysical principles he had begun to discover. 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 were so contrary to his nature, combined with his growing interest in Islam, prompted him to go to Marseilles, the great port of departure for the East. There he made the acquaintance of two key personages, both of them disciples of Sheikh Ahmad al-Alawî, 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 zâwiya. The Sheikh gave him initiation and named him ‘Îsâ Nûr ad-Dîn. 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, Christianity no longer offered the possibility of following an esoteric path under the guidance of a spiritual master. Such a path, centred upon metaphysics and invocatory practice (dhikr), is however always available in Sufism, the heart of Islam.
One night in July 1934, while immersed in reading the Bhagavad-Gîtâ, Schuon experienced an extraordinary spiritual event: the divine Name Allâh took possession of his being, and for three days he could do nothing but invoke it ceaselessly. Shortly afterwards, he learned that his Sheikh had died on the day this grace had come upon him.
In 1935 he returned to the zâwiya of Mostaganem, where Sheikh Adda ben Tounes, Sheikh al-Alawī’s successor, conferred on him the function of muqaddam, thus authorizing him to initiate aspirants into the Alawī brotherhood. Returning to Europe, Schuon founded a zâwiya in Basel, another in Lausanne and a third in Amiens. He resumed his profession as a textile designer in Alsace for the next four years.
One night towards the end of 1936, after a spiritual experience, Schuon sensed, without a shadow of a doubt, that he had been invested with the function of spiritual master, of sheikh. This was confirmed by visionary dreams received by several disciples the same night. The differences of perspective between Schuon and the Mostaganem zâwiya gradually led to Schuon’s assuming independence, supported by Guénon.
In 1938 Schuon traveled to Egypt where he met Guénon, with whom he had been in correspondence for 7 years. In 1939, he embarked for India with two disciples, making a long stopover in Cairo, where he saw Guénon again. Shortly after his arrival in Bombay, World War II broke out, forcing him to return to Europe. Serving in the French army, he was interned by the Nazis, who were planning to incorporate all soldiers of Alsatian origin into the German army to fight on the Russian front. Schuon escaped to Switzerland, which was to be his home for forty years.
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 deeply 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 he 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 deeply interested in religion and metaphysics, was also a gifted painter. He received Swiss citizenship shortly after his marriage. While always continuing to write, 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. Thus it was that in 1959 and again in 1963, at the invitation of their Indian friends, the Schuons journeyed to the American West, where they visited various Plains tribes and had the opportunity to witness many aspects of their sacred 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 the central rites of Native American religion and his paintings of their way of life attest to his particular affinity with their spiritual universe.
Schuon establishes ties with people of different traditions: René Guénon, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Titus Burckhardt, Martin Lings, Seyyed Hossein Nasr, William Stoddart, Léo Schaya, Jean Borella, Marco Pallis, Joseph Epes Brown, Michel Vâlsan , Jean-Louis Michon; many of them will become his disciples. He corresponds with Black Elk, maintains relationships with Swami Ramdas, Metropolitan Antoine Bloom of Souroge, the 68th Shankaracharya of Kanchipuram, Archimandrite Sophrony, Shin’ichi Hisamatsu and other dignitaries of Japanese and Tibetan Buddhism. Schuon’s work has also influenced a number of scholars who made him known, such as Huston Smith who will write the preface to the English version of The Transcendent Unity of Religions, Harry Oldmeadow and many others.
The 1970s saw the publication of three important works composed of articles previously published in the French journal Études Traditionnelles. These works have been translated under the titles:
- Logic and Transcendence, in which the author examines modern philosophy, the proofs of God, universal Substance, emanationism and creationism, intellect and sentiment, the qualifications for the spiritual path, the love of God, spiritual realization, the spiritual master, beauty, intelligence, certitude;
- Form and Substance in the Religions: Truth and divine Presence, the religions, Ātmā and Māyā, the degrees of reality, elucidations concerning the Koran and the Prophet, the Virgin Mary, the virtues and women in Buddhism, the two natures of Christ, evil and the divine Will, sacred texts, spiritual dialectic, paradise and hell;
- Esoterism as Principle and as Way: exoterism and esoterism, the universal veil, the hypostatic dimensions of the Principle, the Tree of Life, human nature, the virtues, sentiment, sincerity, sexuality, trials, spiritual realization, beauty, art, the importance of forms, relics, celestial apparitions, the Sun Dance, spiritual inwardness in Sufism.
Throughout his life, Schuon had great respect for and devotion to the Virgin Mary, and expressed this in his writings. As a result, his teachings and paintings are imbued with a particular Marian presence. His reverence for the Virgin Mary has been studied in detail by American professor James Cutsinger, who relates the two episodes in 1965 when Schuon experienced an especial Marian grace. Hence the name, Maryamiyya (“Marian” in Arabic) of the Sufi tarîqa he founded as a branch of the Shadhiliyyah–Darqawiyyah–Alawiyyah order.
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 established himself, 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. 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.
Schuon continued to receive visitors and maintain a correspondence with followers, scholars and readers. During the last three years of his life, he wrote more than three thousand poems in which doctrine and spiritual counsel are interwoven. Like the poems of his youth, these were written in German, following a series written in Arabic and English. He died on 5 May 1998.
From the English Wikipedia entry on
Frithjof Schuon, with minor editions.