Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teachings

Foreword

Foreword Frithjof Schuon is without doubt one of the major intellectual and spiritual figures of the twentieth century and yet little is known about his life in the English-speaking world. During his lifetime, despite the wide dissemination of his writings in many languages throughout the world, he remained intentionally completely outside of the public limelight and was not easily accessible except to those in quest of spiritual guidance. Furthermore, those who knew him well respected his desire for privacy and did not write publicly about him. Now that he has left this world, however, it is time to make known the life and thought of this colossal figure who has exercised much influence in East and West already and whose works attract an ever greater number of seekers of the perennial wisdom or the philosophia perennis of which he was the foremost expositor in his day. To understand the importance of Schuon one must turn one’s attention to the innate significance of his timeless message as well as to the timeliness of his oeuvre, which comes at a particularly significant moment in both the process of intellectual and spiritual awakening among a number of people in the West and the revival of traditional metaphysics and authentic esoterism in Europe after a long period of having been eclipsed. To comprehend the timeless quality of the Schuonian message, it is sufficient to turn with an open mind and heart to his writings. In this foreword, therefore, we shall leave that question aside and turn to the aspect of the timeliness of his message and his historical role in the revival of perennial wisdom. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time which saw the greatest spiritual eclipse in the West from the point of view of traditional wisdom, those drawn to the study of the inner meaning of things, to authentic metaphysics and esoterism, found themselves in a mental landscape wherein the choices in mainstream culture were between a completely externalized form of religion, a rationalistic and positivist philosophy, or a secularized science. Where were such seekers to find the scientia sacra of the days of old? Such people often turned to occultist and pseudoesoteric movements. This was the era of ix Eliphas Lévi and Papus, of Mme Blavatsky and Annie Besant. A phenomenon had appeared that was unique to the modern West, namely the rise of occultism, which was then mistaken for authentic esoterism. Occultism in the West, which starts with the modern period, produced figures, influences, and forces which ranged from the quaint and the eccentric to the outright spiritually subversive and dangerous, and yet it drew to its fold many seekers who had nowhere else to go. In the second and third decades of the twentieth century a major transformation occurred with the appearance in France of René Guénon, who had himself been associated with many of these occultist circles in his youth. Through direct contact with spiritual authorities from the East as well as through his own God-given metaphysical intelligence, Guénon was able to clear the ground of the errors of the day and build the edifice of authentic metaphysics and esoterism on the soil of the Occident. Although he spent the last twenty years of his life in Cairo, where he had lived openly as a Muslim and where he is buried, he continued to write in French for a Western audience until his death in 1951. In the 1920s the prodigious scholar of Indian art and culture, Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, came to know of Guénon, embraced the traditional perspective, and corresponded with him until his own death in 1947. Coomaraswamy had an in-depth knowledge of a dozen languages and was an unparalleled authority on Oriental art and a master expositor of the Hindu and Buddhist religions in all their dimensions and diverse manifestations. He was also deeply versed in the intellectual and artistic traditions of the West. Like Guénon, he sought to revive authentic metaphysics and esoterism by having recourse to the still existing and viable centers of wisdom in the Orient. Also like Guénon, he defended tradition against the onslaught of modernism and championed the cause of the philosophia perennis whose various formulations in the East and West he knew so well and about which he wrote eloquently in his numerous writings. When Schuon began to write in the early 1930s, these two intellectual giants, Guénon and Coomaraswamy, had already composed many works...