Frithjof Schuon

Frithjof Schuon (, ; 18 June 1907 – 5 May 1998) was a Swiss metaphysician of German descent, belonging to the Perennialist or Traditionalist School of thought.

He was the author of more than twenty works in French on metaphysics, spirituality, religion, anthropology and art, which have been translated into English and many other languages.

He was also a painter and a poet.

With René Guénon and Ananda Coomaraswamy, Schuon is recognized as 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 strongly emphasize the universality of metaphysical doctrine, along with the necessity of practising 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 emigrated to the United States.

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, 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, 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 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-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".

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 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-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.

Schuon reported that one night in July 1934, while immersed in reading the Bhagavad-Gītā, he experienced an extraordinary spiritual event.

He said that the divine Name Allāh took possession of his being, 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.