Swiss philosopher, poet and painter (1907-1998)
Frithjof Schuon ( ; ; 18 June 1907 – 5 May 1998) was a Swiss philosopher and spiritual leader, belonging to the Traditionalist School of Perennialism. He was the author of more than twenty works in French on metaphysics, spirituality, religion, anthropology and art. He was also a painter and a poet. With René Guénon and Ananda Coomaraswamy, Schuon was one of the major 20th-century representatives of the philosophia perennis. Like them, he affirmed the reality of an absolute Principle – God – from which the universe emanates, and maintained that all divine revelations, despite their differences, possess a common essence: one and the same Truth. He also 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. Following Plato, Plotinus, Adi Shankara, Meister Eckhart, Ibn Arabī and other metaphysicians, Schuon sought to affirm the metaphysical unity between the Principle and its manifestation. Initiated by Sheikh Ahmad al-Alawī into the Sufi Shādhilī order, he founded the Tarīqa Maryamiyya. His writings emphasize the universality of metaphysical doctrine, along with the necessity of practicing a religion; he also insists on the importance of the virtues and of beauty. Schuon cultivated close relationships with a large number of personages of diverse religious and spiritual horizons. He 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. Having spent a large part of his life in France and Switzerland, at the age of 73 moved to Bloomington, Indiana, where he had a community of disciples.
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In spirituality more than in any other domain, it is important to understand that a person’s character is part of his intelligence: without a good character − a normal and therefore noble character −, intelligence, even that of a metaphysician, is partially inoperative, for the simple reason that full knowledge of what lies outside us requires a full knowledge of ourselves. A person’s character is, on the one hand, what he wills, and on the other hand, what he loves; will and sentiment prolong intelligence; like the intelligence − which obviously penetrates them − they are faculties of adequation. To know the Sovereign Good really is, ipso facto, on the one hand to will what brings us closer to it and on the other hand to love what bears witness to it; every virtue in the final analysis derives from this will and this love. Intelligence that is not accompanied by virtues gives rise to an as it were planimetric knowledge: it is as if one were to grasp but the circle or the square, and not the sphere or the cube.
One of the first conditions of happiness is the renunciation of the superficial and habitual need to feel happy. But this renunciation cannot spring from the void; it must have a meaning, and this meaning cannot but come from above, from what constitutes our raison d'être. In fact, for too many men, the criterion of the value of life is a passive feeling of happiness which is determined a priori by the outer world; when this feeling does not occur or when it fades − which may have subjective as well as objective causes − they become alarmed, and are as if possessed by the question: "Why am I not happy as I was before?" and by the awaiting of something that could restore their feeling of being happy. All this, it is unnecessary to stress, is a perfectly worldly attitude, hence incompatible with the least of spiritual perspectives. To become enclosed in an earthly happiness is to create a barrier between man and Heaven.
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One of the effects, among others, of modern science has been that of mortally wounding religion by posing in concrete terms problems which esoterism alone can resolve and which remain unresolved because esoterism is not heeded and is heeded less now than ever. Faced by these new problems, religion is disarmed, and it borrows clumsily and gropingly the arguments of the enemy, and this obliges it to falsify its own perspective imperceptibly and disavow itself more and more; its doctrine is certainly not affected, but false opinions borrowed from its repudiators corrode it insidiously "from within", as witnessed by modernist exegesis, the demagogic leveling of the liturgy, Teilhardian Darwinism or the "sacred art" of surrealist and "abstract" persuasion.
Man is a divine manifestation, not in his accidentality and his fallen state, but in his theomorphism and his primordial and principial perfection. He is the "field of manifestation" of the intellect, which reflects the universal Spirit and thereby the divine Intellect; man as such reflects the cosmic totality, the Creation, and thereby the Being of God.
To say that man, and consequently the human body, is "made in the image of God" means a priori that it manifests something absolute and for that very reason something unlimited and perfect. What above all distinguishes the human form from animal forms is its direct reference to absoluteness, starting with its vertical posture; as a result, if animal forms can be transcended − and they are so by man, precisely − such could not be the case for the human form; this form marks not only the summit of earthly creatures, but also, and for this very reason, the exit from their condition, or from the samsāra as Buddhists would say. To see man is to see not only the image of God, but also a door open towards bodhi, liberating enlightenment; or, let us say, towards a blessed centering in the divine proximity.
The first of the virtues is veracity, for without truth we can do nothing. The second virtue is sincerity, which consists in drawing the consequences of what we know to be true, and which implies all the other virtues; for it is not enough to acknowledge the truth objectively, in thought, it must also be assumed subjectively, in acts, whether outward or inward. Truth excludes heedlessness and hypocrisy as much as error and lying.