Frithjof Schuon quotes - page 5

Frithjof Schuon was a Swiss philosopher, metaphysician, and spiritual writer renowned for his work on comparative religion. His teachings emphasized the transcendent unity of religions and the perennial philosophy underlying spiritual traditions. He is regarded as a major figure of the Traditionalist School and a profound exponent of metaphysical thought. Here are 112 of his quotes:

The intelligence may well affirm metaphysical and eschatological truths; the imagination − or the subconscious − continues to believe firmly in the world, neither in God nor in the hereafter; every man is a priori hypocritical. The path is precisely the passage from natural hypocrisy to spiritual sincerity.

Frithjof Schuon

The essential function of human intelligence is discernment between the Real and the illusory or between the Permanent and the impermanent, and the essential function of the will is attachment to the Permanent or the Real. This discernment and this attachment are the quintessence of all spirituality; carried to their highest level or reduced to their purest substance, they constitute the underlying universality in every great spiritual patrimony of humanity, or what may be called the religio perennis; this is the religion to which the sages adhere, one which is always and necessarily founded upon formal elements of divine institution.

Frithjof Schuon

The sense of the sacred, or the love of sacred things − whether of symbols or modes of Divine Presence − is a conditio sine qua non of Knowledge, which engages not only our intelligence, but all the powers of our soul; for the Divine All demands the human all. The sense of the sacred, which is none other than the quasi-natural predisposition to the love of God and the sensitivity to theophanic manifestations or to celestial perfumes − this sense of the sacred essentially implies both the sense of beauty and the tendency toward virtue; beauty being as it were outward virtue, and virtue, inward beauty. It also implies the sense of the metaphysical transparency of phenomena, that is, the capacity of grasping the principial within the manifested, the uncreated within the created.

Frithjof Schuon

Knowledge of the various traditional worlds, thus of the relativity of doctrinal formulations and formal perspectives, reinforces the need for essentiality on the one hand and universality on the other; and the essential and the universal are all the more imperative because we live in a world of philosophical supersaturation and spiritual disintegration.

Frithjof Schuon

The principal cause of a lack of metaphysical understanding is not so much a fundamental intellectual incapacity as a passional attachment to concepts that are congruent with man's natural individualism. On the one hand, transcending this individualism predisposes man to such an understanding; on the other hand, total metaphysics contributes to this transcending; every spiritual realization has two poles or two points of departure, one being situated in our thought, and the other in our being.

Frithjof Schuon

The principle of knowledge does not of itself imply any limitation; to know is to know all that is knowable, and the knowable coincides with the real, given that a priori and in the Absolute the subject and the object are indistinguishable: to know is to be, and conversely. If we are told that the Absolute is unknowable, this applies, not to our intellective faculty as such, but to a particular de facto modality of this faculty; to a particular husk, not to the substance.

Frithjof Schuon

Every time man stands before God wholeheartedly − that is, "poor" and without being puffed up − he stands on the ground of absolute certitude, the certitude of his conditional salvation and the certitude of God. And that is why God has given us the gift of this supernatural key that is prayer: in order that we might stand before Him as in the primordial state, and as always and everywhere; or as in eternity.

Frithjof Schuon

In order to maintain the world in equilibrium, or in order even to improve it in a particular sector, it is not enough that there should be men capable of taking effective measures in keeping with spiritual principles, it is also necessary that there should be saints who, like the "motionless mover" of Aristotle, realize only the "one thing necessary", namely that which constitutes the reason for being of every human city.

Frithjof Schuon

One may be astonished and even scandalized at the frequency, in religious climates, of more or less unintelligent opinions and attitudes, let it be said without euphemism; the indirect cause of this phenomenon is that religion, the goal of which is to save the largest possible number of souls and not to satisfy the need for causal explanations of an intellectual elite, has no motive for directly addressing the intelligence as such. In keeping with its end and with the capacity of the majority, the religious message is basically addressed to intuition, sentiment, and imagination, and then to the will, and to reason to the extent that the human condition requires it; it informs men of the reality of God, of the immortality of the soul and of their ensuing consequences for man, and it offers man the means of saving himself. It is not, does not wish to be, and cannot be, or offer, anything else, at least not explicitly; for implicitly it offers everything.

Frithjof Schuon

It is the sophists, with Protagoras in the lead, who are the true precursors of modern thought; they are the "thinkers" properly so-called, in the sense that they limited themselves to reasoning and were hardly concerned with "perceiving" and taking into account that which "is". And it is a mistake to see in Socrates, Plato and Aristotle the fathers of rationalism, or even of modern thought generally; no doubt they reasoned − Shankara and Ramanuja did so as well − but they never said that reasoning is the alpha and omega of intelligence and of truth, nor a fortiori that our experiences or our tastes determine thought and have priority over intellectual intuition and logic, quod absit.

Frithjof Schuon