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Media Kit
This edition of renowned philosopher Frithjof Schuon’s writings on the subject of art, selected and edited by his wife Catherine Schuon, contains over 270 photographs — 200 color and 70 black and white. Keith Critchlow writes, “This beautiful book … has the broadest coverage of any of the books on art that this writer has seen in forty years of teaching art and architecture.” Frithjof Schuon, the foremost representative of the traditionalist school of thought, presents the universal principles and criteria with which to discern sacred from profane art, and traditional from merely “religious” art. Schuon then deals with the spiritual significance of the artistic productions of Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and the Far-Eastern world. Also covered are the subjects of beauty and the sense of the sacred, the crafts, poetry, music, dance, dress, and ambience.
About the Author(s)
Frithjof Schuon
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 wrote 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. Besides his prose writings, Schuon was also a prolific poet and a gifted painter of images that always portrayed the beauty and power of the divine, and the nobility and virtue of primordial humanity.
World Wisdom features a series titled “The Writings of Frithjof Schuon”, which includes many new editions of classic books by Schuon in new translations and with additional materials. Our online Library contains many articles and poems written by Frithjof Schuon, allowing readers to see a representative sample of his remarkable body of work.
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Catherine Schuon
Catherine Schuon (1924–2021) was an editor, translator, and artist. 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 visits 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.
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 STARTLINKA King James Christmas: Biblical Selections with Illustrations from Around the World, which also features many of her paintings as illustrations.
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Keith Critchlow
Prof. Keith Critchlow is the cofounder of the journal Temenos, as well as the author of numerous books on sacred geometry, including Order in Space and Time Stands Still. He is Professor Emeritus at The Prince’s School of Traditional Arts in London, and a former professor of Islamic Art at the Royal College of Art. Dr. Critchlow, a leading expert in sacred architecture, also founded Kairos, a society that investigates, studies, and promotes traditional values of art and science.For World Wisdom, Dr. Crithchlow has written the forewords to: UL REMOVED
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Reviews
- Catherine Schuon has assembled extracts from [Frithjof Schuon’s] writings and, crucially, has fleshed out their insights and observations with a selection of pertinent and illuminating illustrations. These add a vital dimension to the texts which have hitherto been without the benefits illustration provides. There is also a useful Bibliography of the sources from which these excerpts are taken. The short but perceptive Foreword focuses perfectly on what essentially is required to approach these writings…. There is no more reliable guide to the profoundest implications of what this reciprocity of making and being made means than these texts. Schuon moves seamlessly from culture to culture, from art to art to show, always with an infallible grasp of the primordial reality underlying their manifold approaches and expressions, how we are, according to volition, either plunged into or excluded from the numinous order of Reality.
Temenos Academy Review, issue #10
- This beautiful book allows us to glimpse the world of art through the eyes of Frithjof Schuon, for whom contemplation of the Real was at one with assimilation of the Beautiful. All of Schuon’s magisterial discourses on art are not only coherently integrated into this single volume; they are vividly complemented by appropriate illustrations, judiciously selected by one whose own artistic sensibility was fashioned entirely by Schuon’s vision of the beauty of Reality.
Reza Shah-Kazemi, author of Paths to Transcendence
- Frithjof Schuon’s masterly writings on sacred art explicate immutable principles and illuminate their infinitely varied applications in religious iconography and in traditional arts and crafts. This sovereign metaphysician of the age was fully alive to the spiritual resonances of Beauty in all its manifestations; conversely, he exposed the sterility of a modernistic art which is never more than ‘aesthetic’. We are indebted to Mrs Schuon for the loving care which has informed the editing, illustration and production of this resplendent volume. It is nothing less than a storehouse of insight and wisdom on the boundless realms of Tradition and the integral role of art in the spiritual life.
Harry Oldmeadow, La Trobe University Bendigo, Australia
- This beautiful book, whose words and images have been so lovingly and discriminatingly assembled by Catherine Schuon, has the broadest coverage of any of the books on art that this writer has seen in forty years of teaching art and architecture. It should become the fundamental reference book for all comprehensive teaching of the visual arts, anywhere in the world.
Keith Critchlow, Professor Emeritus, The Prince’s School of Traditional Arts from the foreword
- A beautiful volume in which the intellective beauty of Schuon’s texts is mirrored in the aesthetic truth of the illustrations.
Patrick Laude, author of Singing the Way: Insights in Poetry and Spiritual Transformation
- Frithjof Schuon’s writings and reflections on art are scattered throughout his many books. Given the nature of the composition of these books there is more than a good case for collecting these specific writings into a single volume. Their importance would then be matched by the accessibility they deserve. In lieu of the larger collection, Catherine Schuon has assembled extracts from these writings and, importantly, fleshed out their insights and observations with a selection of pertinent and illuminating illustrations. These add a vital dimension to the texts which, hitherto, have been without the benefits illustrations provides. More or less every current enumeration of art scholarship and appreciation is, literally, turned inside out. It is not simply a question of recognizing that Schuon goes back to first principles, but of incidentally noting that what often passes for first principles are little more than humanist formulae based on deductive observation and aesthetic convention. Schuon’s approach to the Universal nature of art begins beyond such formulae, not with historically based scholarships, but in the recognition of the divine nature of Reality. In this view art is primarily the externalization of transcendent, cosmic principles and secondarily the normative and integral expression of man’s deiformity through the medium of human production. Every one of his insights is rooted in this twofold approach, which in turn allows him, by means of a series of profoundly distilled and ‘poetic’ insights, to pierce to the heart of what, in a given religious and spiritual context, art is and why it matters to our ultimate nature and destiny. It is not his method to embed a work of art and our understanding of it in an historical context (thereby losing it to the museum of past achievement, crowded as it is with the minutiae or personal and circumstantial accidents of creative production), but to distill the living essence of its substance. From the fundamental monuments and images of a sacred tradition to the spiritual resonances of its crafts, its clothing and social ambience (even to the nakedness of the human form) Schuon makes it possible to intuit, in keeping with that substance, what is given as well as what it takes to conform to that, our normality, which resides beyond the human.
It is always and everywhere true that man makes works of art, and it thereby and in turn made by them. What we contemplate we become; which explains both the aberrational art of our time and its repercussions, as well as such inspirational norms as the monuments, images, scriptures, arts and crafts of the sacred traditions. There is no more reliable a guide to the profoundest implications of what this reciprocity of marking and being made means than these texts. Schuon moves seamlessly from culture to culture, from art to art to show, always with an infallible grasp of the primordial reality underlying their manifold approaches and expressions, to show how we are, according to volition, either plunged into or excluded from the numinous order of reality.Brian Keeble, author of Every Man An Artist: Readings In The Traditional Philosophy of Art
- Unlike almost every other writer on art in the 20th and 21st centuries – who focus on the historical, archaeological and stylistic aspects of the subject – Schuon answers the questions that every art student and seeker after truth wants to ask, namely: ‘what does it mean?’ ‘what is it for?’ ‘what kind of people produced it?’ Like all of his other writings, Schuon sums up the essential, stating clearly that: ‘the foundations of art lie in the spirit, in metaphysical, theological and mystical knowledge’; if art is based on a knowledge that transcends it (without which it has no right to exist) then it may perform its rightful role as a communicator of fundamental truths. All art, as Schuon observes with luminous clarity and objectivity, should not only open our eyes but more importantly, our hearts. Its radiating beauty should propel each and every one of us to retrace our path back to the Divine spirit within.
By not only drawing together most of Schuon’s writings on art into one volume, but also sensitively and with great discernment, selecting relevant visual material to illustrate his points, Catherine Schuon and World Wisdom Books have done a monumental service to anyone interested in the true function and meaning of art.
This book is truly a treasure and one that should be on the shelf of every serious art teacher and student as well as all those interested in understanding what the true message of art should be.Emma Clark, author of Underneath Which Rivers Flow: The Symbolism of the Islamic Garden and Path Through the Islamic Garden
- A blending of religious images and words from around the world which comes from a teacher with forty years teaching art and architecture. Nearly three hundred color and black and white illustrations are designed to pair with the text, providing both written and visual illumination and accompanying discussions of art’s connection to sacred worlds.
Midwest Book Review, The Bookwatch June 2007
- The photographs are clear, concise, and of the highest quality. I wanted to linger in the pages as they drew me in.
Benjamin Franklin Awards Committee
