Catherine Schuon, wife of Frithjof Schuon, recalls what he enjoyed in large cities

Catherine Schuon (1924–2021), was married to the philosopher, artist, and poet Frithjof Schuon (1907–1998) for almost 50 years. During those years they took many trips together. These were sometimes to the Swiss Alps or to visit American Indian friends in the Amercian West, or to sacred places in Turkey or many other places. In this video clip, the late Catherine Schuon recounts what her husband loved about large cities and how he would react to sights that were beautiful or those that were not. Other traveling companions of Frithjof Schuon have shared anecdotes about what they learned from him during travels. Several of his friends have recalled that when they encountered an ugly scene, for example, Schuon would look beyond those ugly things and would instead find and dwell on something beautiful. All of these friends came to appreciate the wisdom, self-discipline, and, ultimately, the spiritual value of this type of focus. In his book “Frithjof Schuon: Messenger of the Perennial Philosophy” (World Wisdom, 2010;), author Michael Fitzgerald wrote much about Schuon’s attraction to the sacred and to Beauty and their manifestations in nature and in traditional art. The following excerpt, from pages six to seven of the book, includes some of Schuon’s own words concerning his love of museums: “The young Schuon had an innate appreciation for all manifestations of the sacred. He said several times that ‘four things have always moved me most profoundly: the holy; the great; the beautiful; the childlike.’ One sees, for example, this love of sacred beauty when in 1919, at the age of twelve, he discovered three Buddhist statues in the Museum of Ethnology in Basle. ‘Our first encounter—intense and unforgettable—with Buddhism and the Far East took place in our childhood before a great Japanese Buddha of gilded wood, flanked by two images of Kwannon. Suddenly faced with this vision of majesty and mystery, we might well have paraphrased Caesar by exclaiming: Veni, vidi, victus sum [I came, I saw, I was conquered].’ Thus, from his childhood, Schuon loved museums. ‘I could spend hours visu­ally assimilating the messages of the diverse traditional worlds. For me, visual assimilation came before conceptual assimilation; and here I have in mind not only sacred art, but handicrafts as well, including the most modest; for it can happen that an artifact may vehicle as much spirituality as does sacred art in the strict sense of the term.’ These are early affirmations of an aesthetic intuition that showed itself prominently in later life.”