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The great 20th century metaphysician Frithjof Schuon was also a spiritual master familiar with the spiritual struggles of modern seekers. He once wrote, “To be a human being means to be connected with God; life has no meaning without this.” This “human vocation” means that until we find a personal connection with God we are not able to connect with the innermost being that lies locked up within the human heart.
James S. Cutsinger, author, editor, and scholar, has collected into this volume some of the most memorable writings on prayer and the spiritual life by this great 20th century spiritual figure. Prayer Fashions Man includes an appendix of excerpts from letters and other writings which have not been published before. Thus, previous readers of Schuon will rejoice in this wonderful collection of many of his best writings on prayer and the human vocation, as well as seeing some materials they have never seen before. Readers new to Schuon will find, as countless others have, insights on spirituality that call to their innermost being in a universal language that all people of all times and all religions can, and indeed must, understand.
In his very clear and helpful introduction to the book, Cutsinger writes:
Our aim in this anthology is to give the reader some sense of the range and variety of Schuon’s writings on prayer and the spiritual life, though the full scope of his doctrine on these momentous subjects can by no means be covered in a single volume. In a sense everything Schuon wrote was on the subject of prayer. Asked in a series of interviews during the last years of his life what his advice would be for people in general, he consistently replied by stressing the importance of prayer. “If you understand what is essential and what is absolute,” he said, “you want to assimilate it; otherwise one is a hypocrite.…We may think that God is God: Brahma satyam. But it is not enough to think it; we must assimilate it — we must ‘eat’ it, just as the Christians eat the body of Christ and drink his blood.…And in order to assimilate the truth of the Absolute, you must pray.…
Whether a passage illuminates for us the place of humankind in the cosmos, or the origin of evil, or the errors of the modern world, or any number of other considerations, Schuon’s final advice to us is always the same. We must pray in order to become all that we really are by the grace of God
Prayer Fashions Man includes a foreword by Philip Zaleski.
About the Author(s)
James Cutsinger
James S. Cutsinger (1953-2020) was an author, editor, and teacher whose writings focus primarily on Perennialism and the theology and spirituality of the Christian East. He was professor of Theology and Religious Thought at the University of South Carolina for almost 40 years. Prof. Cutsinger edited a series of new editions of books by Frithjof Schuon.
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Philip Zaleski
Philip Zaleski is an author and editor of works on spirituality, with a particular focus on prayer and the practice of spiritual life. He is the author of The Recollected Heart and Gifts of the Spirit: Living the Wisdom of the Great Religious Traditions, and coauthor (with his wife Carol) of Prayer: A History. Mr. Zaleski is the editor of The Best Spiritual Writing series, and is a senior editor at Parabola magazine. He teaches religion at Smith College and has been a visiting lecturer in literature at Wesleyan University. His writing on religion and culture regularly appears in national publications including The New York Times, Parabola, First Things and Reader’s Digest.
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Reviews
- In this finely selected anthology the editor takes us to the very heart and soul of Schuon’s message, bringing to light the ‘categorical imperative’ of prayer that underlies the whole corpus of Schuon’s works and without which those works would remain merely theoretical. To read this book is to feel the irresistible attraction of prayer, Schuon’s reflections on the spiritual life being suffused with an alchemical power that can arise only from a consciousness rooted in the Object of prayer. What Schuon has experienced he conveys, and in so doing galvanizes our own aspirations for ‘the one thing needful’.
Reza Shah-Kazemi, Institute of Ismaili Studies, author of Justice and Remembrance: An Introduction to the Spiritual Ethos of Imam Ali
- Schuon’s writings may be compared to a dance around the axis of contemplative silence, from which arises true prayer. This new anthology brings out the primacy of prayer in his message by collecting chapters from books as well as private texts and correspondence, thereby providing us with the quintessence of Schuon’s operative teachings.
Patrick Laude, Georgetown University, co-author of Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teachings
- Frithjof Schuon’s importance as a master of mystical theology and metaphysics continues to grow. Professor Cutsinger has composed an outstanding introduction and supplied some of Schuon’s most lucid and penetrating writings on the spiritual life. For those longing for a deeper understanding of prayer and its ontological foundations, this collection will prove to be illuminating and invaluable.
Robert Fastiggi, Sacred Heart Major Seminary
- With this new book, James Cutsinger shows he is an authority and teacher of the first rank on the work of Schuon. Professor Cutsinger has a kind of genius for organization, for discovering an ordering principle in the author’s work and using that principle to guide his own decisions. His editorial hand in the choice of texts and the notes is sure and unobtrusive, letting the master speak for himself while opening pathways of understanding for readers of all levels.
Vincent Rossi, Director of Education for the Jerusalem Patriarchate of the Orthodox Church
- In this remarkable book Schuon, attentive doctor of the soul, exposes the soul’s sophisms and denounces its weaknesses while honoring all the modalities of the inner life, from the simplest to the most vibrant, from personal prayer to the most elevated form of quintessential orison.
Patricia Reynaud, Miami University
- In the words of Marco Pallis, any religion is doomed to more or less rapid disintegration [without]…the dimension of spiritual, intellectual, and physical integration [that is so well articulated in] Prayer Fashions Man.
Brian Keeble, author of Art: For Whom and For What?
- No one knows Schuon’s mind — nor his incomparable gift for transporting attentive readers into their own spiritual depths — better than Cutsinger. In this superb volume he masterfully presents Schuon’s most magisterial passages on the interior life and the soul’s relation to God. His inclusion of previously unpublished letters is a coup that reveals another side of Schuon, a tenderness that places the sage’s adamantine intellectual style in a surprising new light.
Philip Novak, Dominican University of California, and author of The World’s Wisdom
- This extraordinary book is sui generis. Lean, lucid, and graceful in style, Prayer Fashions Man offers profound and pivotal views the likes of which have not appeared in the western world since the times of Meister Eckhart and Dante Alighieri.
Alvin Moore, Jr., editor of Selected Letters of Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
- This new collection makes Schuon’s work more accessible than ever, which is a great boon to those prepared to contemplate religion in universal terms. Here Schuon the metaphysician speaks as a spiritual master, placing the focus on the essential method of the spiritual life — prayer. His exposition of the dimensions and depths of prayer is traditional in the strictest sense, yet by no means confined to archaic forms. New readers will discover what experienced ones already have: that to read Schuon is not only to understand prayer anew, but to be drawn into it.
Carl N. Still, St. Thomas More College
- …This book represents an anthology of fundamental texts, a basis for reflection and a practical manual.
Jean Biès, author and poet
