Frithjof Schuon

[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was the author of over twenty books, as well as numerous articles, letters, texts of spiritual instruction, and other unpublished documents … and by the time of his death in 1998 at the age of ninety, his reputation among many scholars of mysticism, esoterism, and contemplative traditions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