Frithjof Schuon ( ; ; 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.
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.Michael Fitzgerald, Frithjof Schuon Messenger of the Perennial Philosophy, World Wisdom, 2010, p. 1Jean-Baptiste Aymard, Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teachings, SUNY, 2002, pp. 5–7
At primary school, Schuon met the future author Titus Burckhardt, who remained a lifelong friend.Sedgwick, Mark. Against the Modern World. Oxford University Press. 2004. p. 84 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."Michael Fitzgerald, Frithjof Schuon Messenger of the Perennial Philosophy, World Wisdom, 2010, pp. 3, 6
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,Jean-Baptiste Aymard, Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teachings, SUNY, 2002, p. 9 where Schuon became a French citizen, consequent upon the Treaty of Versailles.Pierre-Marie Sigaud, Dossiers H : René Guénon, L’Âge d’Homme, 1984, p. 321 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.Jean-Baptiste Aymard, Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teachings, SUNY, 2002, p. 10
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.William Quinn, Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism, Wouter J. Hanegraaff ed., Brill, 2006, p. 1043 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.Michael Fitzgerald, Frithjof Schuon Messenger of the Perennial Philosophy, World Wisdom, 2010, p. 26 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.Jean-Baptiste Aymard, Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teachings, SUNY, 2002, p. 7
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.Jean-Baptiste Aymard, Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teachings, SUNY, 2002, pp. 16–17 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.Michael Fitzgerald, Frithjof Schuon Messenger of the Perennial Philosophy, World Wisdom, 2010, pp. 32, 34
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.Michael Fitzgerald, Frithjof Schuon Messenger of the Perennial Philosophy, World Wisdom, 2010, p. 40Jean-Baptiste Aymard, Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teachings, SUNY, 2002, p. 61
Schuon reported that one night in July 1934, while reading the Bhagavad-Gītā, the divine Name Allāh took hold of him, and that for three days he could do nothing but invoke it ceaselessly. Shortly afterwards, he learned that his Sheikh had died on the same day.Michael Fitzgerald, Frithjof Schuon Messenger of the Perennial Philosophy, World Wisdom, 2010, pp. 36–37Sedgwick, Mark. Against the Modern World. Oxford University Press. 2004. p. 88
In 1935 he returned to the zāwiya 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 zāwiya 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.Jean-Baptiste Aymard, Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teachings, SUNY, 2002, pp. 21–22
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, he later related, by visionary dreams that several of his disciples reported having had the same night. The differences of perspective between Schuon and the Mostaganem zāwiya gradually led to Schuon's assuming independence, supported by Guénon.Jean-Baptiste Aymard, Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teachings, SUNY, 2002, pp. 23–24
In 1938, Schuon traveled to Egypt, where he met Guénon, with whom he had been in correspondence for 7 years.Michael Fitzgerald, Frithjof Schuon Messenger of the Perennial Philosophy, World Wisdom, 2010, p. 42Sedgwick, Mark. Against the Modern World. Oxford University Press. 2004. p. 92. 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.Barbara Perry, "Introduction" in Frithjof Schuon, Art from the Sacred to the Profane, World Wisdom, 2007, p. xivJennifer Casey (ed.), DVD Frithjof Schuon Messenger of the Perennial Philosophy, World Wisdom, 2012, 43'10"Sedgwick, Mark. Against the Modern World. Oxford University Press. 2004. p. 93.
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.Harry Oldmeadow, Black Elk, Lakota Visionary. The Oglala Holy Man and Sioux tradition, World Wisdom, 2018, p. 116
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."Huston Smith, "Providence Perceived: In Memory of Frithjof Schuon", Sophia Journal, Vol. 4, N° 2, 1998, p. 29 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.Jean-Baptiste Aymard, Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teachings, SUNY, 2002, p. 35 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.Michael Fitzgerald, Frithjof Schuon Messenger of the Perennial Philosophy, World Wisdom, 2010, pp. 74–75