Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998) is best known as the foremost spokesman of the “Traditionalist” or “Perennialist” school and as a philosopher in the metaphysical current of Shankara and Plato. He has written more than two dozen books on metaphysical, spiritual, artistic, and ethnic themes and was a regular contributor to journals on comparative religion in both Europe and America. Schuon’s writings have been consistently featured and reviewed in a wide range of scholarly and philosophical publications around the world, respected by both scholars and spiritual authorities.

Frithjof Schuon was born in Basle, Switzerland, on June 18, 1907. His father, a great concert violinist and teacher at the Basle Conservatory of Music, was a native of southern Germany, while his mother came from an Alsatian family. Until the age of thirteen Schuon lived in Basle and attended school there, but the untimely death of his father obliged his mother, for economic reasons, to return with her two young sons to her family in Mulhouse, France; and thus it was that Schuon received a French‑language education in addition to his German one. At sixteen, Schuon left school to become self‑supporting as a textile designer—a type of work which made only the most modest demands upon the remarkable artistic talent that he had as yet been given little opportunity to develop. As a child he had already taken much pleasure in drawing and painting, but he never received any formal training in the arts.

Also, from early on, he developed those reading interests that were to make of him a man of formidable learning and a self-taught scholar, readings that for the growing young man spanned metaphysical and mystical material from sacred scriptures such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Psalms, but also the writings of authors such as Goethe, Schiller, and Emerson, and later and most importantly that of the French metaphysician, René Guénon who was a forerunner for Schuon’s resurrection of the religio perennis. The universe of the Upanishads and of the Vedas determined the young man’s innermost vocation as a Vedantist, namely someone who saw Reality in terms of pure divine metaphysics—first the distinction between Reality and illusion, then total conformity of the soul to the Real—while the Psalms provided the human complement as it were to the transpersonal vistas of the Vedanta in that they nurtured his innate sense of prayer and trust in the Lord in which, already as a child walking along the Rhine to school he would converse directly with God, sharing everything with Him as spontaneously and naturally as a child with his father; this became a lifelong habit of personal intimacy with God at all hours.

It is also this aspect of personal prayer that provided the antidote, so to speak, to the risk of metaphysical knowledge remaining just mental knowledge instead of realizational knowledge or the salvific impetus it should be in the consciousness of the sincere believer. Schuon had ample opportunity to comment on the schism in the Western mentality that allowed the mind to operate with virtuoso intelligence but without integral moral commitment to the conclusions truth entails, conclusions that owing to the divine nature of truth have to be ethical and not merely intellectual. The absurdity of this disparity in the Western mentality is something that he found particularly dismaying, for truth and sanctity were, from Schuon’s earliest youth, the twin poles of his nature and later the essential message of his writings and art. From the beginning, Schuon’s knowledge was that of someone who knew and saw from “the inside”; he drew his knowledge from his own ontological well. And one of his life’s purposes was to restore in man that capacity which is innate to men of the Golden Age.

Another key dimension of Schuon’s upbringing was the singular fascination for American Indians. As a boy, Schuon had heard much about the Indians from his paternal grandmother, who as a young girl had spent some time in Washington D.C. There she had become personally acquainted with a Sioux member of a delegation of chiefs to the nation’s capital, and although she was not allowed to accept his offer of marriage, she never forgot her Indian friend or his people and later transmitted her love and admiration for the Indians to her children and grandchildren.

For the young Schuon, who yearned intuitively for a Golden Age in which man was born the predestined vessel of the Divine Image and was hence both prophet and prince, as befits the idea of the imago Dei, the encounter with the model embodied by American Indians awakened as an echo the recognition of the archetypal model of man, that is to say of man as pontifex or as the holy bridge between Heaven and earth with primordial nature as his sacred setting. Late as the American Plains Indians world was, it nonetheless transmitted the spectacular nobility of a long bygone age in which each man could be a warrior-priest in direct communion with the Divine—the “warrior” counterpart serving as a uniquely virile and inspiring model for the manner in which one is to overcome both one’s own soul and the world, in its theofugal tendency that is. A host of drawings by the growing boy of American Indians and portraits of their faces, modeled essentially on his own acute inward notion of integral man rather than on individual human models, attest to the extraordinary veracity of his recognition, which was no less than a Platonic anamnesis in which one is allowed to say that “like meets like”.  

As Schuon himself later said, visual assimilation, in his case, came before conceptual assimilation. This ability to see the sacred, to recognize the manifold variety of its manifestations, led him to his discovery of the great religious civilizations of the world, encounters that began partly in museums where he would spend hours assimilating the messages of various traditional worlds. Schuon’s exceptional inductive faculty allied to a powerful imagination[1] enabled him to reconstitute, according to the logic of ontology, what a whole cultural universe was on the basis of just a few telling samples of that culture.

At the precocious age of twelve, he discovered the statues of Buddhas whose depiction of impassive bliss and radiant silence both informed and finally mirrored his own spiritual becoming—sacred harbingers of his own immortal essence. The profundity of those sacred “meetings” were a homecoming for the young Schuon—spiritually orphaned as he was in a secular civilization that was bulldozing millennial centuries of tradition into rubble—who found a mystical confraternity with celestial beings; and yet, these meetings served also as a poignant reminder of the loneliness of his future destiny as a guide of souls (psychopompos), for who is it among men who can understand the nature of a pneumatic, someone who is heaven born? Let alone a man whose whole nature was medieval? In a sense, Schuon was born ancient.

His journey from craft designer, first in Mulhouse then in Paris, to full-fledged spiritual authority took him through many a tribulation, including obligatory enlistment in the French army where he learned to admire the erect discipline of soldiering that mirrored his own invincible self-domination, and then to Marseille; there, a chance meeting with Yemeni dervishes opened the door for a journey to North Africa where, in the Algerian port town of Mostaghanem he met the revered saint, the Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi, a providential encounter that proved to be the turning point in Schuon’s life because there he received the venerable Shaykh’s blessing, his barakah, both for a spiritual method to undertake the “great journey” as well as the formal—and supraformal—means to guide disciples in his own right. The discovery of North African Islam and of the Maghrebi culture in particular, where poverty in the world is wealth in God, reflected in all the arts and crafts as well as in architecture and dress, determined a lifelong bond with a religion that allows each man to be a priest before God.

Having returned to Europe, he went very briefly to India, an experience that was cut short by the outbreak of World War II and the obligation he had of rejoining the army under the French flag. Captured by the Germans, then freed by the same Germans who considered Alsatians to be compatriots, he fled to Switzerland, the country that would, once again, become his home, and for several decades henceforth. There he began the voluminous series of writings on metaphysics, tradition, sacred art, and spiritual alchemy: The Transcendent Unity of Religions, Form and Substance in the Religions, Esoterism as Principle and as Way are but a few of the titles of his books expounding the doctrine of the religio perennis alluded to in the opening, namely the original religion of all time underlying the great divine revelations. These books are a testament to Schuon’s towering intellect, one signal quality of which was his providential capacity to situate the cosmic plight of modern man in the immemorial context of sacred tradition.

In parallel to his writings, and to attending to the growing tide of visitors and disciples that sought his counsel, Schuon started painting scenes of Plains Indian life. After several years of doing so, he finally met and made friends with a number of the members of the Crow tribe in Paris, in the winter of 1953. They had come to Europe to give performances under the auspices of Reginald Laubin and his wife, the well‑known performers and preservers of traditional American Indian dances. After Paris, several of the group came to Lausanne, Switzerland for a week of vacation between their theatrical engagements, in order to visit the Schuons—notably Thomas Yellowtail, who subsequently became an important medicine man and a leader of the Sun Dance religion. Five years later, the Schuons traveled to Brussels in order to meet a group of sixty Sioux who had come to give Wild West performances in connection with the World’s Fair, and with some of whom they developed a lifelong friendship.

These meetings paved the way for the Schuons’ first visit to America, in the summer of 1959, when they were warmly welcomed on the Sioux reservations in South Dakota, and the Crow reservation in southern Montana. In the company of Indian friends they visited other tribes of the Plains and had the opportunity to attend a Sun Dance at Fort Hall, Idaho, on the Shoshoni‑Bannock reservation. When at Pine Ridge, the Schuons were adopted into the family of Chief James Red Cloud, a grandson of the great chief known to history. The old chief gave Schuon the name of Wambali Ohitika—Brave Eagle—the name of his famous forebear’s brother. Later, at an Indian festival in Sheridan, Wyoming, the Schuons were officially received into the Sioux tribe, and Schuon was given the name of Wicahpi Wiyakpa—Bright Star. His wife also received a name from Chief Red Cloud and another at Sheridan, but she gives preference to her first Indian name, Wambali Oyate Win—Eagle People Woman—given to her by old Black Elk, the renowned Sioux medicine man, through the intermediary of their mutual friend Joseph Brown, at the time he was recording Black Elk’s explanation of the Sioux rites.[2]

In 1963, the Schuons visited the Plains tribes a second time, spending the summer among their Indian friends and once again attending a Sun Dance at Fort Hall. During this trip, Schuon took the opportunity to visit the grave of Black Elk in Manderson, South Dakota, and to spend some time with the venerable medicine man’s son Benjamin in the Black Hills. He had already met him during his first trip to the West and then again in the fall of 1962 when the Schuons spent several days in his company in Paris. These visits also consolidated a deep friendship with Thomas Yellowtail begun earlier in Europe.

Mention should also be made of Schuon’s numerous travels to various European countries, notably England where he noticed how the Anglican tradition had preserved the Medieval style of churches and houses, especially in the hamlets, sparing this country the horror of Baroque and Rococo art which did so much to warp the religious culture of the Christian West. He also traveled to Turkey, notably to Ephesus, visiting the shrine of the Virgin Mary’s last home on earth. His travels also took him to Spain, where in Seville he knelt before the Macarena and strode through the halls and porticos of the Alhambra, the Moorish art of which combined, as he expressed it, richness and poverty, the synthesis of sober ecstasy or of ecstatic sobriety. Morocco was also the destination of a number of journeys, as it had been in the time of his sojourn in Mostaghanem. His book, Sufism: Veil and Quintessence, was one of the fruits of these experiences.

A brief comment should be made here of Schuon’s love for the Blessed Virgin, expressed by his visits to her shrine in Ephesus, where she is revered alike by Christians and Moslems, and the shrines in Spain of the Macarena in Seville, the Virgin del Pilar in Saragossa, and that of Montserrat, as well as the shrines in France of Saintes Maries de la Mer and Notre Dame du Bon Séjour, not forgetting in Switzerland the black virgin in l’Eglise des Cordeliers in the medieval town of Fribourg; these sanctuaries were luminous reference marks in his travels where he paid homage to a saint he knew not only as “Mother of the Prophets”, but as the embodiment of the perfect sanctity of soul in which the Spirit is to be born. Dozens of icons are the artistic fruit of Schuon’s devotion to the Blessed Virgin, a devotion hailing back to his youngest school days when he wrote a poem to her extolling her grace. He depicts her both as primordial maiden and heavenly queen, both in her Semitic “likeness” and as the embodiment of the divine Prakriti of primordial metaphysics. To quote Schuon: “The soul in the state of baptismal grace corresponds to the Virgin Mary; the blessing of the Virgin is on him who purifies his soul for God. This purity—the Marial state—is the essential condition, not only for the reception of the sacraments, but also for the spiritual actualization of the real Presence of the Word.”[3]

Finally, at the age of seventy-four, Schuon emigrated to the United States, settling in a home in Bloomington, Indiana, surrounded by forests and far from the din of civilization. The charms of a small university town brought him a peace that he yearned for; and in this woodland retreat, Schuon felt the closeness with the Indian soul as well as with certain Biblical values he so loved and that had not yet vanished among the rural inhabitants. Here also, the friendship begun with the Crow medicine chief so many decades ago in Europe flourished as Yellowtail made a series of yearly visits to Bloomington where both men communed in a privileged spiritual intimacy known only to sages.

Schuon’s Bloomington years culminated with the outpouring in the last few years of over three thousand poems written in his native German. Soon after putting his pen down for the last time, he died at dawn in his home on May 5, 1998 on a day when all of the dogwoods celebrated spring, their sparkling whiteness echoed by white clouds floating across azure heavens. It was a day where it could be said that nature mirrored the grace of soul of a departed man Hindus would certainly have termed a mahatma, a “great soul”.

Adapted from Mark Perry, “Frithjof Schuon: Metaphysician and Artist”, previously unpublished.

“[Schuon is] the most important religious thinker of our century.”
—Huston Smith, author of The World’s Religions

“I have met with no more impressive work in the comparative study of Oriental and Occidental religion.”
—T. S. Eliot,on Schuon’s first book, The Transcendent Unity of Religions

“Schuon’s thought does not demand that we agree or disagree, but that we understand or do not understand. Such writing is of rare and lasting value.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“In reading Schuon I have the impression that I am going along parallel to him, and once in a while I will get a glimpse of what he means in terms of my own tradition and experience.…I think that he has exactly the right view.… I appreciate him more and more.… I am grateful for the chance to be in contact with people like him.”
—Thomas Merton, from a letter to Marco Pallis

“Schuon is unsurpassed—and I would add unequalled—as a writer on comparative religion…. If I were asked who is the greatest writer of our time, I would say Frithjof Schuon without hesitation.”
—Martin Lings, author of Ancient Beliefs and Modern Superstitions

“Schuon seems like the cosmic intellect itself impregnated by the energy of divine grace surveying the whole of the reality surrounding man and elucidating all the concerns of human existence in the light of sacred knowledge.”
—Seyyed Hossein Nasr, author of Knowledge and the Sacred

“[Schuon is in] possession of ‘the gift of tongues’, the ability, that is to say, both to speak and understand the various dialects through which the Spirit has chosen to communicate itself to men in their diversity and therefore, in practice, also the ability to communicate clearly with one’s fellows across the religious frontiers…. [He] exemplifies the power to penetrate all traditional forms as well as to render them mutually intelligible.”
—Marco Pallis, author of Peaks and Lamas

“[Schuon is] widely acknowledged as one of the twentieth century’s greatest authorities on the world’s religions, and the leading spokesman for the traditionalist or perennialist school of comparative religious philosophy. Schuon was the author of over twenty books, as well as numerous articles, letters, texts of spiritual instruction, and other unpublished documents … and by the time of his death in 1998 at the age of ninety, his reputation among many scholars of mysticism, esoterism, and contemplative traditions was unsurpassed. Frithjof Schuon was much more than a scholar, however. An accomplished artist and noted religious poet, he was above all a man of prayer, whose fundamental message, whatever its particular thrust in any given article or chapter, was always linked to the importance of faith and spiritual practice.”
—James Cutsinger, author of Advice to the Serious Seeker: Meditations on the Teaching of Frithjof Schuon

“Frithjof Schuon is well known as one of the greatest metaphysicians of the twentieth century and as Traditionalism’s wisest and most profound exponent.”
—Christopher Bamford,author of The Voice of the Eagle: The Heart of Celtic Christianity

“Schuon … by his universality eludes easy classification, but the concept to which he best answers is that of the Sophia Perennis or Religio Perennis; and the combination of wisdom with spirituality in his message certainly highlights the appropriateness of both terms, which can be synthesized in the idea of Theosophy or Gnosis, provided these words are understood in their original, etymological sense, without reference to any sect, society, or movement.”
—Whitall N. Perry, author of A Treasury of Traditional Wisdom

“For Schuon, philosophy was a wisdom born of certainty, not a skepticism born of doubt. It was not a ‘search’ for answers to badly-put questions, but an exposition of eternal Truth—that ‘wisdom uncreate’ (as St. Augustine called it) which is commonly known as the philosophia perennis.”
—William Stoddart, author of Remembering in a World of Forgetting: Thoughts on Tradition and Postmodernism

“Frithjof Schuon [was] a metaphysician and a spiritual teacher whose … perspective … derived from gnosis, i.e. a spiritual and supra-rational ‘heart-knowledge’ that finds its most direct expression in the primordial and universal wisdom referred to as sophia perennis.”
—Patrick Laude, co-author of Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teachings

“In Schuon’s writings we find the serenity of the vision of ‘that which eternally exists, really and unchangeably,’ outside the temporal which can destroy only itself. His work is full of calm and profound illumination.”
—Kathleen Raine,author of Defending Ancient Springs

“Schuon’s work has a symmetry and an inclusive quality…; there is a balance and fullness which give his writings something of the quality of a spiritual therapy. In this sense Schuon does not simply write about the perennial philosophy but gives it a direct and fresh expression proportioned to the needs of the age.”
—Harry Oldmeadow, author of Traditionalism: Religion in the Light of the Perennial Philosophy

“The highest praise that I can offer concerning the writings of Frithjof Schuon is that they are worthy of their subject matter—the teachings of the great spiritual traditions. Whether one’s views are supported or challenged by these writings, any serious person will feel grateful to be confronted by such a generously discerning intellect and to witness the emergence of authentic contemplative thought in this darkening time.”
—Jacob Needleman, editor of The Sword of Gnosis

“His work has the intrinsic authority of a contemplative intelligence.”
—Bernard Kelly, English Thomist

“[Schuon] is, without doubt, one of the most penetrating philosophical minds of the twentieth century, if not well beyond.”
—Keith Critchlow, author of Islamic Patterns: An Analytical and Cosmological Approach

“Intellectually rigorous in the highest degree…. There is no other voice like that of Schuon.”
—Arthur Versluis, author of Theosophia: Hidden Dimensions of Christianity

“Frithjof Schuon’s written opus is the very expression of his powerful didactic genius. Through its objectivity and its rigor, it is an answer to the questions raised by contemporary man who finds himself disarmed in the face of the overwhelming certainties of modern science and the climate of nihilism that surrounds him. However, Schuon is not a bookish metaphysician, like so many others, but he is first of all an inspired man of prayer, a true sage, and … a ‘born gnostic’ who tends to fully ‘incarnate his archetype’ by actualizing all his inner riches.”
—Jean-Baptiste Aymard, co-author of Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teachings

“Anyone … who is an artist concerned with the sacred should read him…. I am eternally grateful to him.”
—Sir John Tavener, musician and composer

Original Works (Written or Compiled in German, French, and English)

Leitgedanken zur Urbesinnung. Zürich: Orell Füssli Verlag, 1935; second edition (Urbesinnung: Das Denken des Eigentlichen), Freiburgh im Breisgau: Aurum Verlag, 1989.

De Quelques aspects de l’Islam. Paris: Chacornac, 1935.

Sulamith. Bern: Urs Graf Verlag, 1947.

Tage- und Nächtebuch. Bern: Urs Graf Verlag, 1947.

De l’Unité transcendante des religions. Paris: Gallimard, 1948; second edition, Paris: Gallimard, 1958; third edition, Paris: Le Seuil, 1979; fourth edition, Paris: Sulliver, 2000.

L’Oeil du cœur. Paris: Gallimard, 1950; second edition, Paris: Dervy-Livres, 1974; third edition, Lausanne: L’Âge d'Homme, 1995.

Perspectives spirituelles et faits humains. Paris: Cahiers du Sud, 1953; second edition, Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1989.

Sentiers de gnose. Paris: La Colombe, 1957; second edition, Paris: La Place Royale, 1987; third edition, Paris: La Place Royale, 1996.

Castes et races. Paris: Derain, 1957; second edition, Milan: Archè, 1979.

Les Stations de la sagesse. Paris: Buchet/Chastel-Corréa, 1958; second edition, Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1992.

Language of the Self. Madras: Ganesh, 1959; second edition, Bangalore: Select Books, 1998; third edition, Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom Books, 1999.

Images de l’Esprit. Paris: Flammarion, 1961; second edition, Paris: Le Courrier du Livre, 1982.

Comprendre l’Islam. Paris: Gallimard, 1961; second edition, Paris: Le Seuil, 1976.

Regards sur les mondes anciens. Paris: Éditions Traditionnelles, 1968; second edition, Falicon: Nataraj, 1997.

In the Tracks of Buddhism. London: Allen & Unwin, 1968; London: Unwin-Hyman, 1989; second edition (Treasures of Buddhism), Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom Books, 1993; Bangalore: Select Books, 1993; New Delhi: Smriti Books, 2003; Trésors du Bouddhisme. Falicon: Nataraj, 1997.

Logique et transcendance. Paris: Éditions Traditionnelles, 1970.

Forme et substance dans les religions. Paris: Dervy-Livres, 1975.

L’Ésotérisme comme principe et comme voie. Paris: Dervy-Livres, 1978.

Von der inneren Einheit der Religionen (translation by the author of his De l’Unité transcendante des religions). Interlaken: Ansata-Verlag, 1979.

Le Soufisme, voile et quintessence. Paris: Dervy-Livres, 1980.

Christianisme/Islam: visions d’oecuménisme ésotérique. Milan: Arché, 1981.

Du Divin à l’humain. Paris: Le Courrier du Livre, 1981.

Sur les traces de la Religion pérenne. Paris: Le Courrier du Livre, 1982.

Approches du phénomène religieux. Paris: Le Courrier du Livre, 1984.

Résumé de métaphysique intégrale. Paris: Le Courrier du Livre, 1985.

Avoir un centre. Paris: Maisonneuve & Larose, 1988.

Racines de la condition humaine. Paris: La Table Ronde, 1990.

The Feathered Sun: Plains Indians in Art and Philosophy. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom Books, 1990; Le Soleil de Plumes, Art et Philosophie des Indiens des Plaines. Paris: Sulliver, 2000.  

Les Perles du pèlerin. Paris: Le Seuil, 1991.  

Images of Primordial and Mystic Beauty: Paintings by Frithjof Schuon. Bloomington, IN: Abodes, 1992.

Le Jeu des Masques. Paris: L’Âge d’Homme, 1992.

The Garland: Poems by Frithjof Schuon. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom Books, 1994.

La Transfiguration de l’Homme. Paris, L’Âge d’Homme, 1995.

Road to the Heart: Poems. Bloomington, IN: World Wisdom Books, 1995.

Liebe. Freiburgh im Breisgau: Verlag Herder, 1997.

Leben. Freiburgh im Breisgau: Verlag Herder, 1997.

Glück. Freiburgh im Breisgau: Verlag Herder, 1997.

Sinn. Freiburgh im Breisgau: Verlag Herder, 1997.

Adastra & Stella Maris. Lausanne: Editions Les Sept Flèches, 2001.

Herbstblätter & Der Ring/Feuilles d’automne & L’anneau. Lausanne: Editions Les Sept Flèches, 2002.

Lieder ohne Nahmen I, II, III/Chants sans noms I, II, III. Lausanne: Editions Les Sept Flèches, 2002.

Lieder ohne Nahmen IV, V/Chants sans noms IV, V. Lausanne: Editions Les Sept Flèches, 2003.

Lieder ohne Nahmen VI, VII/Chants sans noms VI, VII. Lausanne: Editions Les Sept Flèches, 2003.

Lieder ohne Nahmen VIII, IX, X/Chants sans noms VIII, IX, X. Lausanne: Editions Les Sept Flèches, 2004.

Lieder ohne Nahmen XI, XII/Chants sans noms XI, XII. Lausanne: Editions Les Sept Flèches, 2004.

Das Weltrad I, II/La roue cosmique I, II. Lausanne: Editions Les Sept Flèches, 2004.

Das Weltrad III, IV, V/La roue cosmique III, IV, V. Lausanne: Editions Les Sept Flèches, 2005.

Das Weltrad VI, VII/ La roue cosmique VI, VII. Lausanne: Editions Les Sept Flèches, 2005.

For a complete listing of French and German books and articles by the author, see http://www.frithjof-schuon.com/bib2.htm