34 Facts About Frithjof Schuon

Frithjof Schuon was the author of more than twenty works in French on metaphysics, spirituality, religion, anthropology and art, which have been translated into English and many other languages.

Frithjof Schuon shared with them the certitude that man is potentially capable of supra-rational knowledge, and undertook a sustained critique of the modern mentality severed, according to him, from its traditional roots.

Frithjof Schuon cultivated close relationships with a large number of personages of diverse religious and spiritual horizons.

Frithjof Schuon had a particular interest in the traditions of the North American Plains Indians, maintaining firm friendships with a number of their leaders and being adopted into both a Lakota Sioux tribe and the Crow tribe.

Frithjof Schuon was born in Basel, in the German-speaking part of Switzerland, on 18 June 1907.

Frithjof Schuon was the younger of the two sons of Paul Schuon and Margarete Boehler, both of whom were of German origin.

Frithjof Schuon's father, an amiable and distinguished man, was a concert violinist, and the household was one in which not only music but literary and spiritual culture were present.

At primary school, Frithjof Schuon met the future metaphysician and art specialist Titus Burckhardt, who remained a lifelong friend.

In 1920, Frithjof Schuon's father died and his mother decided to return with her young sons to her family in nearby Mulhouse, France, where Frithjof Schuon became a French citizen, consequent upon the Treaty of Versailles.

In 1923 his brother entered a Trappist monastery, and Frithjof Schuon left school in order to provide for the family, finding work as a textile designer.

Frithjof Schuon then immersed himself in the world of the Bhagavad-Gita and the Vedanta; this call of Hinduism sustained him for ten years, though he was perfectly aware that he could not become Hindu himself.

In 1930, after 18 months in Besancon on military service in the French army, Frithjof Schuon settled in Paris.

Frithjof Schuon saw the sign of his destiny in these encounters, and embarked for Algeria.

However, Frithjof Schuon was forced to return to Europe under pressure from the French colonial authorities.

Frithjof Schuon did not consider his affiliation to Islam as a conversion, since he did not disavow Christianity; in each revelation he saw the expression of one and the same truth, in different forms.

Frithjof Schuon reported that one night in July 1934, while immersed in reading the Bhagavad-Gita, he experienced an extraordinary spiritual event.

Frithjof Schuon said that the divine Name Allah took possession of his being, and that for three days he could do nothing but invoke it ceaselessly.

Frithjof Schuon resumed his profession as a textile designer in Alsace for the next four years.

One night towards the end of 1936, after a spiritual experience, Frithjof Schuon sensed, without a shadow of a doubt, that he had been invested with the function of spiritual master, of sheikh.

In 1938, Frithjof Schuon traveled to Egypt, where he met Guenon, with whom he had been in correspondence for 7 years.

Frithjof Schuon escaped to Switzerland, which was to be his home for forty years.

Frithjof Schuon settled in Lausanne, where he continued contributing to the Guenonian journal Etudes Traditionnelles, as he had done since 1933.

Frithjof Schuon asked his American friends to seek out the old chief.

In 1948 Frithjof Schuon published his first book in French, De l'Unite transcendante des religions.

In 1949 Frithjof Schuon married Catherine Feer, a German Swiss with a French education who, besides being deeply interested in religion and metaphysics, was a gifted painter.

In 1991, one of Frithjof Schuon's followers accused him of misconduct during collective gatherings.

Frithjof Schuon continued to receive visitors and maintain a correspondence with followers, scholars and readers.

Less than two months before his death on May 5,1998 at the age of 90, Frithjof Schuon wrote his last poem:.

For Laude, it is not the notion of the "transcendental unity of religions" that primarily characterizes Frithjof Schuon's teaching, but rather "a reformulation of the sophia perennis, or religio perennis, conceived as the conjunction of a metaphysical doctrine and a means of spiritual realization".

Frithjof Schuon develops this metaphysical principle, notably in Form and Substance in the Religions, basing himself on the Sufi doctrine of the degrees of reality, known as "The Five Divine Presences":.

Frithjof Schuon emphasizes that the Real, or Beyond Being, which is absolute and infinite, is the essence of all good.

Frithjof Schuon recalls the three modes of prayer: personal prayer in which the worshipper opens himself spontaneously and informally to God; canonical, impersonal prayer, prescribed by his tradition; and invocatory prayer or "prayer of the heart", which "is already a death and a meeting with God and places us already in Eternity; it is already something of Paradise and even, in its mysterious and 'uncreated' quintessence, something of God".

Frithjof Schuon created us in His image; faults are superimposed.

Frithjof Schuon was a frequent contributor to the quarterly journal Studies in Comparative Religion which dealt with religious symbolism and the Traditionalist perspective.