It is rare indeed to encounter a man who is at one and the same time a great thinker and a great artist. In most cases, a genius for intellectual discernment and the formulation of doctrine is exclusive of a genius for aesthetic perception and artistic creation, and this for the simple reason that the phenomenon of genius normally exhausts itself in a single domain. With Frithjof Schuon, however, the two capacities are bound together: his art is a manifestation of intellectual discernment, and his discernment possesses a quality both moral and aesthetic.
Schuon's intellectual point of departure is the discrimination between the Absolute and the Relative, or between Atma and Maya, as the Vedantists would say. Knowledge does not derive from reasoning grafted onto physical and psychological experience; on the contrary, it has its source in the pure intellect, which contains all metaphysical and cosmological ideas in its very substance. Man has access to them in principle through "Platonic recollection"; in fact, however, most men are exiled from their spiritual root, so that they must receive the Truth from the outside, through spiritual practice as well as through doctrine.
The artistic side, with Schuon, springs from a consciousness of universal symbolism; for God manifests His Qualities through beauty. There is the beauty of virgin nature and of man and of art; genuine and legitimate art always has something of the sacred in it, whether directly or indirectly. Man lives by Truth and by Beauty; Schuon writes books and paints pictures. His books express the metaphysical doctrine in which all the religious systems and all the spiritual methods have their origin; he thus takes his stand in the perspective of the philosophia perennis.
Much of Schuon's intellectual knowledge may be accounted for in terms of his extraordinary aesthetic intuition. It suffices for him to see—in a museum, for example—an object from a traditional civilization, to be able to perceive, through a sort of "chain reaction," a whole ensemble of intellectual, spiritual, and psychological ideas. An important point in his doctrine is that beauty is not a matter of taste, but an objective and hence obligating reality; the human right to personal affinity—or to "natural selection," if one likes—is altogether independent from aesthetic discrimination, that is to say from the understanding of forms.
Frithjof Schuon was born in Basle, Switzerland, on June 18, 1907. His father, a concert violinist and teacher at the Basle Conservatory of Music, was a native of southern Germany, while his mother came from an Alsatian family of German stock. Until the age of thirteen Schuon lived in Basle, but the untimely death of his father obliged his mother, for reasons of economy, to return with her two young sons to her family in Mulhouse; and thus it was that Schuon received a French-language education in addition to his German one. At sixteen, Schuon left school to become self-supporting as a textile de-signer—a type of work which made only the most modest of demands upon the remarkable artistic talent that he had as yet little opportunity to develop. As a child he had already taken much pleasure in drawing and painting, but he never received any formal training in the arts.
Schuon began very young his search for metaphysical truth, and this urge for understanding led him to read not only all the classical and modern European philosophers but also the sacred doctrines of the East, notably those of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam. In Western philosophy it was above all Plato and Eckhart who awakened an echo in his thought. Among Eastern writings, the Bhagavad Gita was his favorite reading.
Parallel to his interest in philosophy was his love of traditional art; here the painting and sculpture of Japan held a preeminent place in his esteem. He was from his earliest years fascinated by all that was sacred, and his first meeting with a representation of the Buddha in the Ethnological Museum of Basle, made a profound impression on him.
In the Mulhouse period, Schuon came upon the writings of Rene Guenon, which served to confirm his own intellectual rejection of the modern civilization while at the same time bringing into sharper focus his spontaneous understanding of metaphysical principles and their traditional applications.
As a young man, Schuon went through a year-and-a-half of compulsory military service in France, then worked again as a designer in Paris. He took lessons in Arabic at the Paris mosque and in 1932 Schuon spent several months in Algeria where he met the famous Shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi, who introduced him to Sufism. After his second stay there in 1935 he went on to visit Morocco where the still traditional way of life greatly impressed him. In 1938, he went to Cairo in order to meet Guenon, with whom he had been in correspondence for the past six years. He saw Guenon again a year later as he passed through Egypt on his way to India, a country with whose contemplative climate he had always felt a strong affinity. However, the Second World War broke out, obliging him to return to Europe after only a few days' stay in Bombay. He was, by law, obliged to join the French army as a soldier. Captured by the Germans, he was allowed a certain freedom by virtue of his Alsatian background, but when it appeared likely that the Nazis would oblige Alsatians to enter the German army, he seized the opportunity to escape to Switzerland where, after brief imprisonment, he was given asylum. Some years later, he obtained Swiss nationality.
Schuon settled in Lausanne and shortly thereafter began to write. His articles had begun to appear in Etudes Tradition-nelles—a French review originally dedicated to the publishing of Guenon—as early as 1933. From 1963 on Schuon was also a regular contributor to the English review Studies in Comparative Religion. The first of his books—The Transcendent Unity of Religions—appeared in 1948 and was soon followed by The Eye of the Heart and Spiritual Perspectives and Human Facts. These and his succeeding works were written in French. Earlier he had published a book in German entitled Primordial Meditation., as well as two volumes of lyric poetry, also written in his native German. There are now more than two dozen books which have been printed in English, and his works appear in twelve different languages.
In 1949, Schuon married Catherine Feer, of Swiss origin, German-speaking like himself, but educated in French from the age of thirteen and, also like himself, highly gifted for painting. It was after his marriage that Schuon began to paint regularly, devoting most of his canvases to depictions of American Indians in their traditional setting. As a boy, Schuon had heard much about the Indians from his paternal grandmother, who as a young girl had spent some time in the city of Washington. There she had become acquainted with a Sioux member of a delegation of chiefs to the nation's capital, and although she did not accept his offer of marriage, she never forgot her Indian friend and later transmitted her love and admiration for the Indians to her grandchildren.
Schuon met and made friends with several members of the Crow tribe in Paris in the winter of 1953. They had come to Europe to give performances in a troupe under the auspices of Reginald Laubin and his wife, the well-known performers and preservers of traditional American Indian dances. After Paris, several of the group came to Lausanne for a week in order to visit the Schuons—notably Thomas Yellowtail, who later became an important medicine man and a leader of the Sun Dance religion. Five years later, the Schuons traveled to Brussels in order to meet the Sioux who had come to give Wild West performances in connection with the World's Fair.
These meetings paved the way for the Schuons' first visit to America, in the summer of 1959. In the company of Indian friends they visited many regions of the Plains and had the opportunity to attend a Sun Dance at Fort Hall, Idaho, on the Shoshone-Bannock reservation. When at Pine Ridge, the Schuons were adopted into the family of Chief James Red Cloud, a grandson of the great chief known to history, and later, at an Indian festival in Sheridan, Wyoming, the Schuons were officially received into the Sioux tribe.
In the spring of 1965, Schuon made the first of a series of regular trips to Morocco. He sailed to Turkey in the spring of 1968, where he visited Istanbul, Bursa, and Kusadasi—this last in order to permit a number of visits to the House of the Blessed Virgin in its peaceful mountainside setting above Ephesus.
In 1980 the Schuons moved from Switzerland to the United States. Schuon rarely traveled during the last eighteen years of his life there, but a stream of friends and admirers regularly came to visit him in his secluded home in Bloom-ington, Indiana. His old friend, Thomas Yellowtail, came to Indiana each autumn from 1980 until his death in 1993. He adopted Schuon into the Crow tribe on one of his annual visits in 1984.
The last three years of Schuon's life were a time for an outpouring of more than 3200 German-language poems—the final crown on his remarkable written corpus comprising, besides his books, countless letters and texts on the spiritual life.
Frithjof Schuon died peacefully at his home in May 1998 at the age of ninety.
Since four of Schuon's paintings are included as illustrations, a remark is necessary about his work as a painter. In his paintings, Schuon's intention is to express inward truths, or higher realities as lived through the medium of his own soul, and he does so by means of human portraits and scenes taken for the most part from the life of the Plains Indians. He also painted pictures of the Virgin-Mother, not in the style of Christian icons but in the form of the Biblical Shulamite or the Hindu Shakti. His artistic works combine traditional rules with a kind of intellectual rigor and an adequate observation of nature which gives them a powerful originality and exceptional expressiveness.
From the time of his earliest childhood Schuon has been drawn to four things: the great, the beautiful, the childlike, and above all, the sacred. Much in his writings and art and in his life itself can best be understood in terms of this quaternity.
Barbara Perry
April 2006, Bloomington, Indiana