Catherine Schuon

Catherine Schuon (1924–2021) was an editor, translator, and artist. She was born on August 13, 1924 in Bern, Switzerland. As the daughter of a career Swiss diplomat she was exposed to many cultures, spending her early school years in pre-war Berlin and then in Algiers, where she learned French and came to love North-African culture. She returned to Switzerland during World War II, where she received her Maturité Fédérale degree in 1943 and helped to care for refugee children. Just as World War II ended, she joined her father, who had been named Swiss Ambassador to Argentina. While in Argentina she learned Spanish and developed her gift for painting. Having no affinity with the diplomatic life, she returned to Switzerland where she worked with Italian artists.

Her interest in world religions and spirituality brought her into contact with Frithjof Schuon, the famous writer, whom she married in May 1949. She accompanied her husband on all of his travels and helped him to receive visitors and answer correspondence from spiritual seekers who came to seek her husband’s counsel. Her work with her husband brought her into contact with people from diverse religions and from throughout the world. Gifted in languages, she also became fluent in English and conversant in Italian, in addition to the three languages of her youth: German, French and Spanish.

Along with her husband, Catherine Schuon was adopted into the Sioux and Crow tribes. The Schuons lived near Lake Geneva until 1980 when they moved to the United States and established themselves in the forests of Indiana.

After her husband’s death in 1998 she spent several months each year traveling throughout the world to visit many of her late husband’s admirers, each time returning to the serenity of her home in the woods of Indiana.

Catherine Schuon is the editor of Art from the Sacred to the Profane: East and West, a collection of Frithjof Schuon’s selected writings on art, and the co-editor of A King James Christmas: Biblical Selections with Illustrations from Around the World, which also features many of her paintings as illustrations. The late Mrs. Schuon also wrote the wide-ranging piece that is included as the Introduction to Letters of Frithjof Schuon: Reflections on the Perennial Philosophy. Her Introduction is in the online library on this website.

Besides her published work, Mrs. Schuon’s collaboration played an important part in many projects by World Wisdom and by other publishers around the world. For World Wisdom, for example, the translator of Emir Abd el-Kader: Hero and Saint of Islam stated in the “Introduction” to the book that the work “ … entailed a great deal of detailed labor and discerning selection, and we are very grateful to Mrs. Catherine Schuon for having volunteered her talents for the work required, as well as for reviewing the entire translation and making many valuable suggestions.” Her familiarity with her husband’s intended meanings, as well as her fluency in so many languages, made her contributions essential to the accurate translations of Frithjof Schuon’s numerous poems and letters that have appeared in books worldwide. As an artist, her talents and her knowledge of traditional art assisted in the design and production of many publications in the United States and elsewhere.

Catherine Schuon died on April 7, 2021 at her home in Bloomington.