Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teachings

CHAPTER ONE. A Biographical Approach

CHAPTER ONE A Biographical Approach He is one who speaks from the experience of what he has seen, And this makes all the difference. The celestial rider has passed by; The dust has risen into the air, He has hastened on, but the dust he has raised Is still there, in suspense— Look straight in front of thee; Let thy gaze deviate neither to the right nor to the left; The dust is here, and he Is in the Infinite. —Rûmî, Rubâ’iyat At the beginning of the twentieth century the Schuon family, of Germanic origin but of Valaisan stock, had been living in Basel for some years. Paul Schuon, whose parents were Swabian, first emigrated to Alsace, after it had become German in 1870, following the Franco-Prussian war. There he married Margarete Boehler, who was Alsatian on her mother’s side, but whose father was originally from the Rhineland. They had two sons. The first, Erich, born on April 26, 1906, was to become many years later a Trappist monk under the name Father Gall. The second, Frithjof, was born on June 18, 1907.1 A violinist and a professor at the Basel Conservatory, Paul Schuon had formed a friendship during a concert he gave in Oslo with a ship’s captain named Frithjof Thorsen; it was to the remembrance of this friendship that his second son owed his unusual name from the land of fjords.2 The Schuon brothers spent the best part of their childhood in Basel, a “fairy-tale city,” as Frithjof later said in deep appreciation of the romanticism of this city on the edge of German Switzerland. As a child he liked to walk in the 5 Frithjof Schuon as a child in Basel, 1916. Personal collection, Catherine Schuon. A Biographical Approach 7 old, melancholic streets, stroll along the Rhine, and dream, alone or with friends, on the Pfalz which overlooked it. Germanic to the core, and speaking at this time only German, Schuon was impregnated from childhood by that poetic and mystical culture whose particular expression in fairy tales and traditional melodies he never forgot. It was also because his father liked to play the violin like a gypsy that this music always had a nostalgic attraction for Schuon. His sensibility led him quite naturally in the direction of German romanticism, “nurtured by the Middle Ages, at once chivalrous , enchanted and mystical.” “Doubtless,” he wrote in a letter to his friend Hans Küry, “many children of that era—it was, as it were, the end of the nineteenth century—breathed that same air.” Very early he read Goethe and Schiller, then later Heine and many others; but his father’s library contained treasures of another kind. A gifted musician and an occasional poet, Paul Schuon was an amiable and distinguished man, a dreamer, naturally aristocratic and mystical in his fashion, sensitive to the atmosphere of Islam and India of old. And this is how the young Frithjof was able to find, among his father’s books, the Bhagavad Gîtâ, which enchanted this twelve-year-old, the Quran, the Vedas, and also the Arabian Nights, which his father read to the family in the evenings. Even though his parents, who were of Catholic origin, were not expressly practicing, Schuon was brought up in a profoundly religious atmosphere, and as a young child he was sent to Evangelical catechism,3 where the “simple and intense piety of this first teacher” made a singular impression on him. This pious Lutheran was indeed able to inculcate in him biblical principles, and to introduce him to the world of Abraham and the Psalms. He said much later of the predominant Lutheranism of his childhood, “It cannot be pure heresy. . . . Its priorities are simplicity, inwardness and trust in God; nothing else touched me in my early childhood” (letter to Hans Küry, November 17, 1982). Schuon sought from his youth onwards to find consolation in sacred art and prayer. An introvert, he felt like a stranger, misunderstood by those around him. His profoundly artistic nature 4 and his taste for the authentic led him to look in museums for the traces of past wisdom which seemed to him like windows opening onto a lost world. “I could spend hours visually assimilating the messages of the traditional worlds. For me visual assimilation came before conceptual assimilation ” (Letter to Marco Pallis, June 8, 1982). Thus...