Frithjof Schuon

The man who “loves God” is thus one who “dwells in the Inward” and “is oriented towards the Inward”; in other words, he remains motionless in his contemplative inwardness — or his “being”, if one prefers — while moving towards his infinite Center. Spiritual immobility is here opposed to the endless movement of external phenomena, while spiritual movement, on the contrary, is opposed to the natural inertia of the fallen soul, to the “hardness of heart” that must be cured by “grace” and “love”, whose remedy, that is to say, is everything which softens, transmutes, and transcends the ego.

Schuon, Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, World Wisdom, USA, 2012.

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I am myself, and not someone else; and I am here, such as I am; and this necessarily occurs now. What must I do? The first thing that is obligatory, and the only thing that is obligatory in an absolute fashion, is my relationship with God. I remember God, and in and through this remembrance, all is well, because this remembrance is God’s. Everything else lies in His hands.

Frithjof Schuon, Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, World Wisdom, 2012, p. 22.

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The life of a man, and by extension the whole individual cycle of which that life and the human state itself are only modalities, is in fact contained in the Divine Intellect as a complete whole, that is to say, as a determined possibility that, being what it is, is not in any of its aspects other than itself, since a possibility is nothing else than an expression of the absolute necessity of Being; hence the unity or homogeneity of every possibility, which is accordingly some thing that cannot not be.

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There are two moments in life which are everything, and these are the present moment, when we are free to choose what we would be, and the moment of death, when we have no longer any choice and when the decision belongs to God. If the present moment is good, death will be good; if we are now with God — in this present which is ceaselessly being renewed but which remains always this one and only moment of actuality — God will be with us at the moment of our death. The remembrance of God is a death in life; it will be a life in death.

Frithjof Schuon, Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, World Wisdom, EUA, 2012, p. 42.

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The majority of moderns who claim to understand art are convinced that Byzantine or Romanesque art is in no way superior to modern art, and that a Byzantine of Romanesque Virgin resembles Mary no more than do her naturalistic images, in fact rather the contrary. The answer is, however, quite simple: The Byzantine Virgin — which traditionally goes back to St. Luke and the Angels — is infinitely closer to the truth of Mary than a naturalistic image, which of necessity is always that of another woman. Only one of two things is possible: either the artist presents an absolutely correct portrait of the Virgin from a physical point of view, in which case it will be necessary for the artist to have seen the Virgin, a condition that cannot easily be fulfilled — setting aside the fact that all purely naturalistic painting is illegitimate — or else the artist will present a perfectly adequate symbol of the Virgin, but in this case physical resemblance, without being absolutely excluded, is no longer at all in question.

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In the Middle Ages there were still only two or three types of greatness: the saint and the hero as well as the sage, and then on a lesser scale and as it were by reflection the pontiff and prince; the “genius” and “artist”, those glories of the secular universe, had not yet been born.

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Holiness is the sleep of the ego and the wake of the immortal soul — of the ego, fed on sensorial impressions and filled with desires, and of the soul, free and crystallized in God. The moving surface of our being must sleep and must therefore withdraw from images and instincts, whereas the depths of our being must be awake in the consciousness of the Divine, thus lighting up, like a motionless flame, the silence of the holy sleep.

Frithjof Schuon, Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, World Wisdom, 2012, p. 13.

To ask for the proof of intellection — hence of a direct, adequate and infallible knowledge of the supernatural — is to prove that one does not have access to it, and, analogically speaking, it is like asking for the proof of the adequacy of our elementary sensations, which no one doubts, on pain of not being able to live. But the absence of metaphysical intellection in most men of the “iron age” does not for all that close the door to the saving supernatural, as is shown by the phenomenon of revelation, and the subsequent phenomenon of faith, both of which presuppose a kind of elementary — but in no way insufficient — intuition, which we could term “moral” and sometimes even “aesthetic”; for in fact, the reality of God penetrates all our being. To doubt this is to make of oneself “a house divided against itself.”

Frithjof Schuon, “The Primacy of Intellection”. Available on the website Studies in Comparative Religion. Read the entire essay clicking here.