Milk

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"The Milk of the Virgin: The Prophet, the Saint and the Sage"

by Renaud Fabbri

Prophets, saints, and sages:
The prophet brings a form of faith — a religion;
The saint lives it; the sage opens
A luminous realm of Pure Spirit
Beyond form. Prophets are also wise men,
Yet about the highest Truth they speak softly;
To the sage, holiness bestows light.

God and our heart are united in eternity.

(Frithjof Schuon)


There have been a few controversies in the last decade about the teaching and personality of the 20th century Perennialist author and founder of the Maryamiyyah Sufi order, Frithjof Schuon (1907-1998), also known under the name of Sheikh Isa Nur Ad-Din Ahmad. These controversies have been reflected to various degrees in articles published by traditionalist journals as well as in recent scholarly publications. In the following paper, it will be argued that Frithjof Schuon is best understood neither as the founder of a new religion (a prophet in the classical sense of the word) nor as a Muslim saint, but as a universal sage, a spokesman for the religio perennis whose connection with Islam, although providential, remains secondary in the context of his message of esoterism, universality and primordiality.
Before we engage in an attempt at defining a sage, we will need to refute two types of criticisms against Schuon. Religious exclusivists have argued that Frithjof Schuon succumbed to a primordialist illusion. He attempted more or less consciously to restore the Adamic religion and to institute the religio perennis as an autonomous and separate creed, a ―meta-religion‖ for the initiates. A few academics have also portrayed the Schuonian perspective as a kind of ―neo-Sufism,‖ ultimately falling outside the scale of an Islamic orthodoxy that they conceive in a very rigorist, almost Salafi manner. These two interpretations point in the same direction. They call into question the authority of Frithjof Schuon as a religious philosopher and as a spiritual master.
The first and second parts of this article will successively refute both of the aforementioned interpretations. As we will show, Schuon never regarded the sophia or religio perennis as a substitute for a revealed religion. It would also be inadequate however to characterize Schuon simply as a Sufi master open to the other religions. Even though his message was providentially manifested within the Sufi framework and not superimposed on it, Schuon was consciously and from the very beginning centered on the sophia perennis, the everlasting and informal wisdom and not on Islam. In the third part of this article, we will finally propose a different characterization of Schuon. On the basis of a tripartite division suggested by Schuon himself between the prophet, the saint and the sage, we will conclude that Sheikh Isa possesses the stature and the function of a sage, of a Platonic or Hindu type. For this reason, it is impossible to attribute to him a particular religion. Those who reproach him for usurping the prophetic function show that they have
not fully understood who he was as well as the Marian wisdom he was charged to formulate in our time. Given the nature of our topic, we will have to touch in the course of our study upon a large variety of questions, returning more than once to the same question, each time from a different perspective. In fact, it can hardly be otherwise when analyzing a figure as multidimensional as Frithjof Schuon.
This study relies primarily on Schuon‘s public and private writings as well as on the book, Frithjof Schuon: Life and Teaching by Jean-Baptiste Aymard and Patrick Laude.2 In our mind, this book represents a unique biographical and doctrinal synthesis, which brilliantly demonstrates, if at all needed, that in the case of Schuon it is futile to oppose the message and the messenger. Our interpretation offered below is much indebted to their work.

Part One: Prophethood and the Religio Perennis

Before examining the reason why some may have wrongly believed that Schuon claimed for himself the rank of a prophet or even a revealer, it is first essential to remark that according to the unanimous teaching of all the surviving faith traditions, the possibility of a new revelation is a priori excluded till the end of the present (final) cycle. It would thus be bizarre in the extreme for Schuon to claim, like so many New Age gurus that he had come to institute a new form of religion or even to restore the primordial religion, before the apocalypse and the coming of the Redeemer. In fact, Schuon never attempted to return to the Adamic religion and to present himself as the agent of this restoration. His appeal to the religio perennis was rather inspired by the disinterested recognition of ―what already is,‖ of an everlasting and objective set of truths. He regarded his mission as being to recall to ―those who have ears to hear.‖ As Olivier Dard has rightly argued, Schuon conceived of the religio perennis as a vertical and archetypical Reality rather than as of a distant historical origin (Guénon‘s Primordial Tradition) or as a promise for the future (a new Golden Age). We could add that his reference to it amounts to an opening to a primordial and universal inspiration, taking place in the context of a purely esoteric and jnanic path.
As a religio and not solely as a sophia, this perennial wisdom certainly affects the manner of practicing one‘s religion and of living one‘s faith but this religio perennis or religio cordis never represented in Schuon‘s eyes a totally autonomous and self-sufficient means of salvation or deification. In its name, he never rejected nor downplayed God-instituted forms. On the contrary, he constantly stressed the importance of both orthodoxy and orthopraxy, and this even for esoterists. Schuon provided a four-fold definition of the religio perennis that clearly shows that it does not represent a substitute for a revealed religion and cannot be identified with the primordial religion practiced by Adam and Eve before the fall. The four elements of the religio perennis are: (1) the discrimination between the Real and the unreal, between Atma and Maya; (2) the concentration on the Real (Atma); (3) the practice of fundamental virtues; (4) the belonging to a traditional and revealed religion.
Schuon did not frame this notion of religio perennis as anew religion, with its own dogma and rites. Esoterists in every orthodox tradition have a more or less direct and conscious access to this ―underlying religion‖ but according to the Schuonian perspective, it cannot be a question of practicing the religio perennis as a separate form. It is however legitimate to use the word religio because, in the etymological sense, the religio perennis "relates" man to Heaven and ultimately to the Absolute. It refers to a primordial heredity and to what binds mankind to God in the deepest sense.
In Schuonian thought, the appeal to this perennial connection goes hand with hand with an effort to penetrate the inner meaning of each particular form. Religious forms may be more or less ―metaphysically transparent‖ but Schuon was always very attentive to their phenomenological diversity. He was never content to reduce them to the simplicity of a unique diagram. On the contrary, he often returned to the raison d’étre of this diversity in his writings. On the one hand, for Schuon, formal religions are upayas (―celestial strategies‖), providential superimpositions or veils on the core-essence of the sophia perennis.
They serve ―as the vestment of the ‗naked truth,‘ the primordial, perennial and universal religion.‖ On the other hand, religious forms correspond to as many archetypes in the ―divine Spirit‖ itself or hypostatic faces of the ―divine Subject.‖ They anticipate in the divine
order the plurality of the historical and ethnical receptacles.
We recognize here, on the plane of religious forms, the two aspects of Maya in the Vedantic doctrine. Maya represents both a power of illusion and a power of projection. Religions are simultaneously a veiled light and a veil of light but they are nevertheless equally ―willed by God.‖ Each religion creates a homogenous cosmos, characterized by its own spiritual laws and its particular perspective on the Absolute. From a more sapiential viewpoint, revelation also corresponds to a sudden and macrocosmic objectivation of the universal Intellect. Schuon explained that religions providentially supply for the lack of spiritual intuition in fallen man. Unlike the primordial human being of the satya yuga or the jivanmukta, the average man of the kali yuga does not benefit anymore from a subjective revelation. He does not receive spontaneous unveilings of truths virtually inscribed in the substance of his intelligence. For this reason, he needs what religion offers to overcome the force of samsara.
Schuon wrote not only about the religio perennis, but also of ―quintessential esoterism.‖ The two coincide to some extent, although the latter is more akin to the perspective of immanence. This ―quintessential esoterism‖ is not based on some sort of theological or mystical speculation but has objective premises: the ―presiding idea‖ of a given revelation. By this, Schuon means the fundamental symbols and rites, governing its spiritual economy. In the case of Christianity, it is the idea of Divine manifestation: the complementarity between the mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption and the identification of Christ with the Heart. Another source for ―quintessential esoterism‖ is the ―nature of things,‖ by which Schuon refers to the essences as they are seen through the ―naturally supernatural‖ Intellect, the immanent Logos in man.

Schuon is however forced to recognize that there exist de facto two degrees within esoterism: an absolute esoterism—quintessential esoterism—and a relative esoterism. Relative esoterism, which coincides with most of the historical forms of Sufism and Christian mysticism, is characterized by a very problematic solidarity with the exoteric mentality. It prolongs exoterism more or less harmoniously, ―radicalizing or redefining it in a certain way, but only insufficiently perceiving its relativity.‖5 Relative esoterism also tends to justify its existence and its positions thanks to an inspirationist exegesis and a hyperbolic and fideist hagiography. The price attached to this attitude is the lowering of esoterism to the anti-metaphysic level of volitive man— the vaisyas and the ksatriyas rather than the brahmanas to refer to the Hindu caste system-and the inevitable mix between the values of the two domains. For exoterism, the driving force is the aspiration of the soul to salvation. For esoterism, what counts above all is the disinterested and unifying contemplation of impersonal Truth. The human spirit is attracted by the celestial ray and wants to return to its heavenly origin.
Schuon insisted more than once on the Aryan and Brahmanical character of his perspective. As a consequence, his teaching is often much closer to Asian non-dualism than ―soufisme moyen‖ or conventional Sufism, even though, in the Semitic domain, a pristine esoterism cannot fail to manifest sporadically and bearing in mind also that all Sufi esoterism was not reduced to writing.6 To one of his correspondents, Schuon once explained that such a radical form of esoterism necessarily exists in every religious climate because it is adapted to pneumatic natures. This gave him the right to create an esoteric organization of a ―vedantic type,‖ that is to say based on universal metaphysics, within the framework of Islam, and this without falling into heterodoxy. To this he added in the same letter, that his exceptional situation is intimately connected to the cyclical conditions and the end of the kali yuga. In general Schuon constantly stressed the terminal character of esoterism, symbolized in Judaism by the return of Elijah,7 although he never succumbed to the temptation of
―millenarianism.‖ According to Schuon, the traditional science of religion, the inner knowledge of the religious traditions and their ―transcendent unity‖ could not become the object of a new prophetic revelation. Such a science was nevertheless reserved to the end of time, for that moment in history when boundaries between religious forms would ultimately collapse and when new intellectual keys, which only esoterism is able to provide, would be needed to explain the plurality of the religious revelations and the limitations of their confessional credos.
The Catholic author Jean Borella has opposed a relativistic and hermeneutical definition of esoterism to Schuon‘s ―quintessential esoterism.‖ 8 He has argued that the notion of an ―absolute esoterism,‖ beyond confessional denominations and identical to pure metaphysics is a dangerous abstraction because in the post-Adamic state, man is not qualified to follow a metaphysical path as Schuon conceives it. Fallen man has lost his capacity to know universal essences directly and he can perceive them only through a ―semantic experience‖ defined as a confused intuition of meaning, of an intelligible unity. As a consequence, for Borella, what differentiates concrete esoterism from exoterism remains a question of degree. Esoterism only provides a deeper understanding of a given historical revelation but ultimately even a metaphysical approach like Vedanta is reducible to a particular, although eminent form of religious hermeneutics.
Borella‘s starting point here is clearly not a pristine non-dualism but a Semitic mythology, a dynamic and historicist upaya structured around a volitive eschatology. It is precisely the religious nature of this perspective that leads him not only to wrongly identify the religio perennis with the religio adamica but also to derive absolute conclusions from the Fall of man, ultimately downplaying the human ability for unifying contemplation. On this latter question, we agree with Borella that mere intellectual intuition should not be confused with ontological identification between the knower and the known. Only pure knowledge of the unconditioned Absolute is absolute and beyond duality. By contrast, knowledge of the relative is relative, and a duality thereby persists between the subject and the conditioned object, even for the most sanctified soul. But none of the traditionalist authors suggested otherwise—not even Guénon when he misquoted Aristotle. However, we do not believe that it is possible to reduce the sapiential intuition to merely a vague and speculative ―semantic experience.‖ To do so is to deny, along with the possibility of supra-rational knowledge of the essences, the possibility for fallen man to transcend the duality between the subject and the object and to attain a metaphysical type of realization. By limiting knowledge as Kant proposes, we thereby close the door to an authentic path of gnosis that culminates in a deifying union with the non-dual Reality (Paratman). At the summit of Supreme Reality, Schuon teaches, it is not man who knows the Absolute or the All-possibility, but it is the Absolute which knows Itself in the mirror of the human soul, and the question of limitations affecting the individual receptacle becomes secondary.
Let us add that some of these criticisms largely reify Schuon‘s more subtle dialectic, which constantly insists on the gap existing between intellectual knowledge and spiritual union as well as on the need to integrate the psychical elements during initiatory work. In fact, it is plain that fallen man, even if he is an Advaitin, necessarily starts from a given revelation in his journey to God. Shankara in his Brahma-Sutra Bhasya explains that man may attain the supreme state without observing the prescribed rites because of his attention perpetually concentrated on Brahman. But he nevertheless insists on the necessity of Vedic revelation in order to acquire true divine knowledge and Schuon never dreamt of contesting such a truth. Far from taking religious revelations lightly, Schuon liked to paraphrase the well-known saying of Saint Irenaeus and to explain that at the time of a revelation, it was Atma itself that entered into Maya so that Maya might be able to return into Atma. That being said, in the Vedantic perspective adopted by Schuon, a revelation is ultimately considered a means to burn away the empirical and egotist envelopes, in order to actualize a pre-existent and incorruptible knowledge inscribed in the Heart-intellect. As far as individual intellect (buddhi) is concerned, it belongs to man only from the standpoint of ignorance (avidya). But approached from the standpoint of the highest truth, intelligence is the reverberation of Atma at the center of the human microcosm. Geometrically speaking, ―the Intellect is a ray rather than a circle; it ‗emanates‘ from God rather than ‗reflecting‘ Him.‖10 The goal of sapiential esoterism is for the individual to merge into the universal Spirit by following this celestial ray.
As we have mentioned previously, some have regretted that Schuon does not pay more attention to the hermeneutical dimension of esoterism. It is true that for obvious reasons, Schuon is less interested by scriptural exegesis than by universal metaphysics. However, Schuon‘s quintessential esoterism, to the extent that it penetrates the inner meaning of every possible revelatum and identifies its ―presiding idea,‖ can also be characterized as hermeneutical in a plenary manner. What Schuon has to offer to us is a hermeneutics of the Sacred as such and in a far more rigorous and universal sense than Mircea Eliade‘s phenomenology. Its vocation is to understand the ―language of the Self‖ and to teach us, to the extent that is humanly possible, the ―grammar of the Divine.‖ Schuon prudently observes however that the traditional ―science of religions,‖ although necessarily inspired by God and not elaborated by human reason, is more contingent than gnosis itself, crystallizing only in providential and exceptional circumstances.
At this point, it might be interesting to contrast briefly Frithjof Schuon‘s esoteric ecumenism with Ramakrishna‘s universalism. Along with his reading of René Guénon and the Bhagavad-Gita, it is through his reading of the Gospel of Ramakrishna that Schuon initially discovered Hinduism. A chapter of Spiritual perspectives and Human Facts11 is dedicated to Ramakrishna and to his ambivalent posterity. Not only does the Hindu saint, who was a fervent devotee of the Divine Mother, profess the convergence of the great religions, but having realized the supreme state as an Hindu, he followed the Muslim and the Christian paths, establishing on a practical and existential ground their intrinsic orthodoxy and their convergence with traditional Hinduism. In an interview with Jean Bies, Schuon refers to Ramakrishna as an Eastern precursor of the Perennialist school, but it is clear that despite the great plasticity of his intelligence, Ramakrishna embodies the ―unity of religions‖ in an essentially bhaktic way. By contrast, Schuon not only sees the underlying and common substance of every religious form. He also understands the meaning of their diversity as well as demonstrates their ―transcendent unity‖ on the basis of pure metaphysics and a God-given science of their archetypes in divinis. In his perspective, the providential economy of sacred forms and their mystical convergence are illuminated by the purely objective and disinterested light of jnana. If both Schuon and Ramakrishna pass beyond religious forms, the liberating point is nevertheless located at two different levels. In Ramakrishna‘s experience, their outer shells are broken under the pressure of Divine love, whereas in Schuon‘s perspective, the outer shells are first restored in their divine transparency. Ultimately, the outer religious forms have to vanish in the light of the Inner Self but only after revealing their celestial raisons d’étre. Those who believe that human intelligence is too weak to know God‘s intentions will probably object that this Schuonian doctrine of the transcendent unity of religions is excessively kataphatic. All that we should reasonably admit is that there exists a plurality of religions, inspired to some degree by God but it would be impossible to know their raisons d’étre and the precise nature of their relationships. Schuon was however not a profane philosopher like Hegel. He never claimed to have exhausted the Divine Mystery with his thought—the doctrine of the transcendent unity of religions is not ―the philosophy of the Absolute Spirit‖—but only to have better explained than others what can be conceptually expressed about the logic underlying religious diversity.
Schuon defines the level where religious divergences are reconciled as the domain of the Virgin Mary, Sayyidatna Maryam in Islam. Along with the Russian Sophiologists,13 Schuon identifies the Virgin with the Wisdom of the Proverbs and the Ecclesiastes. He even identifies her with the religio perennis itself. Schuon‘s ―mystical contacts‖ with the Virgin explain the very special place she occupied in his spiritual life and her role as the patroness of his community.14 In 1965 while on a boat at Port-Vendres between the French coast and Morocco, ―the Divine Mercy overwhelmed [ Schuon] in a special manner; it approached [him] inwardly in a feminine form … which [he] knew to be the Holy Virgin.‖15 Schuon later described the coming of the Virgin as a sign of his ―heavenly adoption‖ and after these moments of Grace, Schuon added ―Maryamiyyah‖ to the names of his tariqah to distinguish it from the North African Alawi tariqah. By her living presence, the Virgin Mary initiated a new chapter in Schuon‘s life, communicating a more shaktic dimension to his message, complementary to his intellectual and more masculine insights on the metaphysical truth.
With this mariophany, it is even more difficult to follow those who would like to reduce Schuon‘s religio perennis to the level of a mental abstraction. Some readers might nevertheless express fears that this growing interest in the Holy Virgin, by introducing an avataric intermediary distinct from the Prophet of Islam, represented a step toward the foundation of a new religion. Schuon made it clear however that by bestowing her Grace on him, Mary did not intend to inspire another religion or a ―new religious movement.‖ He interpreted her coming as a heavenly ―seal‖ and a blessing for his supra-confessional perspective. For Schuon, the terrestrial Virgin, the mother of Jesus, transmits a message of humility, interiority and resignation to the Will of God. She incarnates the sanctified soul and the creature in its primordial state (fitra). In Sufi terms, she perfectly realizes ―holy poverty‖ (faqr) as well as the primordial servitude (ubudiyya) of the creature in the face of God. On the operative plane, she is a model for those who remain in spiritual retreat (khalwah) and who invoke the divine Name in order to purify their heart.
If Mary symbolizes on earth the faithful servant (abd) and the spiritual retreat, in Heaven she is exalted as the mother of the avatara and the―Mother of the Book‖ (umm al-kitab). Schuon calls her, after the Iranian Sufi Ruzbihan Baqli, ―the mother of all the prophets and the prophecy and the substance of the original sainthood‖16 and along with a few Sufis and Islamic theologians,17 he attributes to her the status of a prophetess (nabiyyah and even rasulah). In general, Schuon distinguishes ―four categories of incarnation, two of them ‗major‘ and two ‗minor,‘ each of the two groups comprising a ‗plenary‘ [or solar] and a ‗partial‘ [or lunar] incarnation.‖ The major avataras are the ―founders of religions, or in circumstances where the question of a renewal of form could not arise, the supreme dispensers of grace, such as Rama or Krishna.‖ The great sages and saints ―who within the framework of a given tradition and consequently, on a lesser scale, repeat the function of the major avataras‖ are the minor incarnations.18 There exist also feminine avataras or shaktis, whose role is ―always relatively secondary, whatever the level of their manifestation.‖19 Mary is virtually the only feminine avatara of the Semitic world.20 She pertains to the category of the major avataras of the lunar type, although when she is conceived as the feminine aspect of the Logos and even as its essence, her wisdom necessarily transcends these distinctions.
Whereas the Prophet of Islam represents the path and the deployment of all the perfections and Jesus the wisdom of the inward, the Virgin incarnates the non-legislative and primordial wisdom. By contrast with the wisdom of Solomon, which is at once ―encyclopedic, cosmological, metaphysical and also practical,‖ the wisdom of Mary ―does not embrace certain contingent orders.‖ It is ―of necessity metaphysical, mystical and eschatological‖, and ―thereby contains in virtuality every possible science, as the one and colorless light contains the varied and colored hues of the rainbow.‖21 It follows that her risalah is not the risalah of her son, but her son himself, who symbolizes in this context the Logos as such. If religious life is ―a complex system― presented to us as ―an indispensable condition of salvation, outside of which there is nothing that could save us,‖ there must necessarily be ―a level where these systems as such lose much of their importance.‖ This is not other than ―the domain of Mary, the Virgin Mother who, according to a symbolism common to Christianity and Islam, has suckled her children—the Prophets and sages—from the beginning and outside of time.‖22 In the secret of the mystical night (layla), the profound peace (sakina) descends on the hearts of those she has elected to receive her perennial wisdom as well as the heritage of the primordial religion (din al-fitra).
In Islamic terms, the Holy Virgin occupies the station of the non-legislative prophethood (nubuwwa ‘amma). As it is well known, certain Sufis such as Ibn Arabi, who have necessarily an infinitely lesser status than the Virgin, claimed to have realized this station. For them, it is the only kind of prophethood still accessible after the Koranic revelation and the risalah of Muhammad. This degree excludes the revelation of a new law (shariah) and coincides with the highest degree of Sainthood and the station of Proximity (maqam al-qurba). But for Schuon, the Virgin was not only a nabiyyah but also a rasulah. Because of this supereminent perfection, indispensable for her role as ―Coredemptress,‖ the Virgin could not just be one among those who have attained this station. It is sometimes said that the avatara was ―created before creation.‖ Similarly, it can be said in the case of the Virgin that she occupied this maqam ―before creation.‖ Thisuniversal and informal prophethood is traditionally symbolized by Khidr, the prophet without community and the mysterious companion of Moses. But on the basis of the Koran and the sacred history, it seems perfectly plausible to associate it with the figure of Maryam especially if following Schuon we recognize in the Virgin the terrestrial reflection of the Logos under its feminine aspect and identify her with esoteric knowledge (haqiqa).
Being virgin and mother, Maryam also gives a human form to divine Mercy. Usually, the soul is considered as feminine in the face of God but in this new perspective, the spiritual traveler is masculine in the face of the feminine Rahmah. He becomes the son of the Holy Virgin. According to Schuon, Rahmah is not only an attribute of God (Allah) but is ―integrated into the Divine Essence inasmuch as it is fundamentally none other than the radiating Infinitude of the Principle‖23 or the All-Possibility which prefigures relativity in the Absolute itself. It results from this doctrinal point that it is impossible to reduce the Schuonian Mariology to the level of a prophetology. Schuon‘s insight on the Marian mystery culminates with her exaltation beyond the domain of the Logos, to the degree of a ―Name‖ of God. In Schuon‘s universal perspective, it is the same Name that manifests in different religious climates as the Hindu Goddesses, the female Bodhisattvas or the Holy Virgin. Mary may even be identified vertically with the divine Reality itself that the Sufis sometimes designate by the feminine word Dhat, meaning the Essence.
This brief survey of Schuon‘s Mariology shows that Virginal Mystery is truly located at the core of his message of essentiality and universality and it is therefore impossible to speak of the religio perennis as a pure abstraction and without mentioning the merciful personification of the Holy Mother. To conclude on the notion of religio perennis, it is also worth making the following comment. To attribute to Schuon a prophetic status—a status that he never claimed for himself—might be acceptable, but only if we are referring to the non-legislative prophethood in Sufism. As we have already remarked, this degree is directly related to the Marian wisdom. But the realization of the sage who has become, by virtue of a particular election, ―his own prophet‖ precisely excludes the revelation of a new religion. The history of Sufism also proves that such a claim, even if exoterically unacceptable, would not represent a move toward the institutionalization of the religio perennis or the creation of a religio schuonica.

Part Two: Islamic Sainthood and Quintessential Esoterism

In the first part of this article, we frequently referred to Sufi notions
to explain Schuon‘s teaching. It cannot be denied however, that when he
deals with gnosis and the religious Law (shariah) or the meaning of religious pluralism, Schuon frequently departs from the opinion of the Muslim esoterists including so revered a saint as Ibn ‗Arabi. In fact, if Schuon‘s relationship with Islam needs to be acknowledged—he was a Sufi Sheikh in one of the great Sunni brotherhoods—a too close assimilation of Schuon‘s message with historical Sufism is potentially detrimental to the understanding of his perspective. Some interpretations of Schuon using unilaterally the criteria and values of Islamic hagiography have even already proved to be very misleading.
In his book Against the Modern World,26 Mark Sedgwick has depicted Schuon as the leader of a syncretistic Islamic brotherhood. In his opinion Schuon who was initiated into orthodox Sufism by the Sheikh Ahmad Al-Alawi progressively abandoned authentic Islam, first by breaking his ties with the North African successors of his master and then by opening his tariqah to foreign influences, introducing in particular Native American rites after his settlement in Bloomington in 1980. This viewpoint relies on two and intimately related presuppositions about Schuon, false in our opinion: (1) the substance of his teaching has fundamentally changed over the years; (2) as a religious philosopher and as a spiritual master, he should be approached primarily as a Sufi phenomenon.
Against the typically modernist and psychological temptation to delineate Schuon‘s evolution, we are going to insist on the contrary on the underlying continuity in his personality. Schuon‘s interest in the Shamanic Weltanschauung began in Europe when he was only a child and in his first book Leitgedanken zur Urbesinnung (―Primordial Meditation: Contemplating the Real‖), Schuon adopted the same universal and metaphysical perspective as in his later books, despite a style comparatively less developed than in his more mature works. Even the contemporary debate regarding the balance between the sophia perennis and the Islamic forms in his teaching was somehow prefigured in his controversy in the late 1940‘s, early 1950‘s with his former disciple, the neo-akbarian scholar Michel Valsan about what a western tariqah should be.27 It follows that Schuon‘s evolution is better a progressive unveiling of certain potentialities, culminating with his doctrinal writings in the 1980‘s and his didactic poems during the last three years of his life. In this perspective, the growing emphasis of the late Schuon on primordiality and universality did not represent a deviation but corresponded to a final, yet perfectly natural crystallization revealing that, to some degree, Schuon‘s connection with Islam was not absolutely essential.
By this statement, we do not intend to deny that the providential framework of Schuon‘s initiatory teaching was Islam. As is now well documented,28 the Sheikh Ahmad Al-Alawi offered Schuon an initiation as well as the concept of the supreme Name and its invocation during his journey to Mostaghanem in 1932. Schuon later received from the Sheikh Adda Bentounès the function of moqqadem and directly from Heaven the status of Sheikh al-barakah, which gave him the right to organize a regular branch of the Shadhiliyya Alawiyya order in Europe. This ―election‖ from above clearly suggests that it was less Schuon who
chose Islam than Heaven that chose Islam for him. Within the monotheist cycle, this particular tradition is characterized, at least in its symbolism, by the predominance of knowledge, as opposed to love in Christianity and fear in Judaism, and also by the absence of a highly organized priesthood, favoring a relative independence for the esoterists. In Islam, extremes also meet. The ―primordial religion‖ (Din al-Fitra), whose most direct heritage remains Hinduism, is brought back to its simplest expression, the divine Unity (Tawhid) and it is therefore beyond doubt significant that the last religion of the cycle provides the liturgical support for a final manifestation of total truth in ―the Latter Days.‖
We do not underestimate Schuon‘s contribution to Islamic traditional intellectuality and we would like to take this opportunity to insist that in his understanding of Islam, Schuon did not superimpose foreign ideas or practices. On the contrary, even more than any other traditionalist author, Schuon was always very respectful of the symbolism of Islam‘s essential rites and beliefs. For him, the intrinsic orthodoxy of Islam resulted from its Message, synthesized by the ―five pillars‖ and in particular the twofold testimony of faith in which all wisdom is virtually contained as in a sort of mantra or Upanishad.29 Even his reference to the Holy Virgin may be traced back to the Sufi notion of ―prophetic heritage.‖ According to Ibn Arabi, every Muslim saint, in addition to being a recipient of the Muhammadan barakah, is placed under the patronage of a pre-Islamic prophet.30 The Marian Grace that descended on Schuon in 1965 only revealed his spiritual predisposition, his profound nature as a maryami. Schuon‘s tariqah is maryami by adoption and shadhili by origin. In a private text, 31 Schuon wrote that the coincidence between the two qualities is not accidental: according to the Imam Shadhili, the faithful foqara of his lineage are preserved from the fire of hell and the Koran teaches that Maryam and her descendants are protected from the power of Satan.
In our opinion, this undeniable connection of Schuon with Islam did not mean however that his message was intrinsically Islamic or that Islamic categories should be employed as the primary vehicle for a presentation and interpretation of his teaching. In fact, to prevent Schuon‘s message of essentiality and universality from being obscured, his association with Islam has to be put in a proper perspective, one that first and foremost recognizes that Schuon was not a convert in the sense that he never burned what he had adored, that is to say rejected Christianity in the name of Islam. As he once wrote to Benjamin Black Elk, his adhesion to Islam was essentially motivated by his desire to find a spiritual master and a contemplative method that no longer existed in Western Christianity and that was inaccessible to him under its Hindu form.
For the same reasons, many Western readers of Guénon but also Muslims touched by modernity have found in Schuon‘s teachings, a practical application and a complement to the doctrine presented by Guénon, but also an unique opportunity to escape a too unsatisfactory and unrealistic religious exclusivism by the upward path of esoterism. Because of its orientation and origin, the Maryamiyah tariqah could not be a tariqah like the others. In his correspondence, Schuon wrote that, ―according to the nature of things and therefore in the eyes of God‖ it would be completely abnormal if he and his followers were ―Muslims exactly the same way as born Muslims, including the esoterists.‖ Men objectively and subjectively in their situation necessarily have ―contents of consciousness‖ and experiences that native Muslims do not have, which give them ―some sense of perspective with regard to the most particular aspects of Islam.‖33 In the same letter, having referred to the Hindu doctrine as their ―immovable point of departure,‖ he added that what distinguishes them psychologically from converted individuals is that their mind is ―a priori centered upon universal metaphysics‖ and ―the universal path of the divine Name.‖
It is because of these two factors that we are in a traditional form, which in fact—but not in principle—is Islam. The universal orthodoxy emanating from these two sources of authority determines our interpretation of the sharî‘ah and Islam in general, somewhat like the moon influences the oceans without being situated on the terrestrial globe; in the absence of the moon, the motions of the sea would be inconceivable and so to speak ―illegitimate‖. What universal metaphysics says—as does also the ―onomatological‖ science connected to it—holds decisive authority for us, a fact which once earned us the reproach of ‗deislamization of Islam.‘34
Responding indirectly to those French Guénonians who reproached him for ―de-islamizing Islam,‖ he made somewhere else the observation that it is often difficult for a Muslim of esoteric inclination to understand the approach of a Westerner (or a Hindu) desirous of following an esoteric way. Whereas the latter ―would find it logical first of all to
inform himself of the doctrine, then to enquire about the method and finally about its general conditions,‖ the Semitic Zealot will spontaneously ―reply that one must begin at the beginning, namely with pious exercises and all sorts of religious observances; metaphysics will be for later.‖ By adopting this attitude, the latter demonstrates that he is not capable of seeing ―that understanding of doctrine cannot result from a moral and individualistic zeal, but that on the contrary it is there to inaugurate a new dimension and to elucidate its nature and purpose.‖
Underlying Schuon‘s point here, we recognize not only the axiomatic opposition between two religious mentalities but also the distinction already established by Guénon between ―esoteric Islam‖ and ―Islamic esoterism,‖ between a perspective that places Islam first and conceives esoterism as its inner aspect and another which sees the haqiqa, the esoteric Truth first and then attributes to the shariah the limited role of a contingent framework. Schuon has particularly insisted in Sufism, Veil and Quintessence, on the problematic nature of ―esoteric Islam‖ as it has developed historically in the Arabic and Arabized world. Schuon certainly felt very little empathy for the pietistic attitudes that Muslim saints have frequently encouraged in the name of a poorly-defined esoterism. It was Schuon‘s view that far from representing a pristine gnosis, as other Perennialist authors have been willing to describe it, Tasawwuf has on many occasions taken the form of a ―massified‖ esoterism, which clothes sapiential esoterism with the narrow categories of a moralistic, legalistic and individualistic theology. As a result, the perspective of asceticism and religious observances and a sort of karma marga have too often predominated over metaphysical knowledge.36 Schuon saw this very ambiguous eso-exoteric symbiosis as largely incompatible with pure and disinterested esoterism and as quite specific to the last revelation of our cycle.37 By contrast with average Sufism, Schuon always placed the Essence above the form, Wisdom above religion, and the universal substance of his message sometimes contradicted its religious envelope, generating misunderstandings and misgivings against a noble soul who always remained faithful to himself.
The exceptional situation of Schuon is concretely illustrated by the fact that he had followers in religions other than Islam, namely Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism, to whom he offered a spiritual guidance in the context of their respective traditions. On this last question which represented a point of disagreement with Guénon, Schuon acknowledges that for a spiritual master to cross religious boundaries represents ―a very precarious possibility because of the high degree of spirituality it requires of the master, and also because of the possible difficulty, for him, of verifying facts situated in a traditional world other than his own.‖ About such a possibility, Schuon observes that the spiritual master will act as ―the vehicle of a foreign barakah and this, precisely, presupposes a spirituality which had concretely transcended the world of forms.‖
Some defenders of Frithjof Schuon have nevertheless tried to identify precedents to Schuon‘s universalism in the Sufi tradition, and ecumenical statements are to be found among those Sufi masters who have realized what Ibn ‗Arabi called the ―Non-Station‖ (la maqam) and the state of Perfect Man (insan kamil). One has however to remark here that universalism was, in most of such cases, the unexpected result of an inspiration or the effect of a providential contact with a foreign religious climate as for some Indian Sufis. By contrast, universalism was a point of departure for Schuon. His spiritual journey did not start from a particular religion, namely Islam, but from a theoretical universalism he first discovered in the writings of Guénon, and ended with supra-confessional gnosis. The Islamic barakah, personified by the Sheikh Al-Alawi was certainly providential to actualize this universal wisdom. But other powerful spiritual influences also converged on him and Schuon‘s situation was in any case quite different from the one of born-Muslim saints. Whereas for the latter, universalism stemmed from a mystical state and finally from the relatively subjective dimension of ―Presence,‖ in the case of Schuon, universalism had a perfectly objective content, related to the more impersonal dimension of ―Truth.‖ To explain the universality of his perspective, it has been argued that during his life, Schuon gradually ascended through degrees of universality all the way to the supreme viewpoint of the unconditioned Logos. But those who support this view should nevertheless acknowledge at the same time that, in this ascent, Schuon was progressively unveiling an innate and primordial wisdom and that he never lost sight of his universal starting point. It follows that Schuon‘s case remains quite unique with respect to the Islamic norms and in our opinion it was clearly not so much in virtue of his degree of spiritual realization that the function of Sheikh Isa crossed the boundaries of Islam. It overflowed beyond Islam, because from the beginning it was centered on the sophia perennis.
Similarly, we have mentioned how Schuon‘s celestial adoption by the Holy Virgin may be understood in Islamic terms. It would be through the barakah of the Prophet that Schuon entered in contact with Sayyidatna Maryam and became a saint of Maryami type. The Marian wisdom was handled down to him in a similar manner as the Sufis of the past received the wisdom of the pre-Islamic prophets. In this perspective, Sayyidatna Maryam only personifies an aspect of the Muhammadan Reality (haqiqa muhammadiyya) and in Schuon‘s life she acted as a shakti of Muhammad. Schuon was certainly not adopted ―despite‖ his Islam. Numerous texts testify of his profound insights and mystical intimacy with the Prophet39 and as we wrote previously Schuon often referred to this Sufi notion of prophetic heritage. It can nevertheless be remarked that from the perspective of the sophia perennis—which is not a religion in itself but the origin of every religion—the Virgin also symbolizes the essence of the Logos, its unconditioned dimension before any particularization as Muhammad, Jesus, Krishna or Buddha. As the celestial Mother, she appears greater than any of her ―sons,‖ the masculine prophets and avataras. 40 It was precisely not as a dimension of the Muhammadan Logos or as the mother of the Koranic Jesus that the Holy Virgin came to Schuon. He saw her under a primordial form more or less independent from the specific laws governing the Islamic sector, combining in her person
Christianity, Islam and Hinduism. We say ―more or less‖ because the plurality of the ―avataric faces‖ should not lead us to lose sight of the fundamental oneness of the Logos: it would be absurd to oppose the Virgin to Muhammad whereas Schuon has frequently compared the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin to the illiteracy of the Prophet Muhammad.41 Schuon was also perfectly aware that he was not living in the Golden Age: a mariophany, even of first magnitude, cannot totally abolish the delimitations between the religious sectors.
The category of fard has frequently been applied to Schuon to account for the apparent irregularity of his perspective. The ―solitaries‖ are Gnostics who are born initiated. They do not follow the path of the average spiritual travelers (salikun), because like the majdhub they are ―attracted‖ and are largely independent with regard to the religious law. Schuon was probably a ―solitary‖ within Islam but he was also largely independent of the Islamic domain itself. Unlike other traditionalist authors such as Guénon, Schuon‘s role did not consist in a passive function of transmission and commentary. He was not a ―doctor‖ but a plenary spiritual master. Vis-à-vis the wisdom traditions of the ages, what Schuon offered was an inspired and active re-adaptation of these traditions that was of a purely esoteric nature, and particularly needed at this critical moment in the cosmic cycle. By contrast with Islamo-centric portraits of Frithjof Schuon, which are anxious to establish the orthodoxy of his views, our view is that Schuon did not emerge from a Muslim matrix but was providentially situated at a point of intersection for virtually all the rays of truth, whatever their origin. We strongly disagree with those who pretend that to give birth to ―the intensely spiritual climate‖ of his doctrine, Schuon simply borrowed tonalities or atmospheres from ―already existing religions‖ and that he transposed them ―aesthetically onto the level of a (re)constituted sophia perennis.‖42 The jnanic synthesis made by Schuon is not reducible to a superficial syncretism. Schuon did not incorporate rites of other traditions in his method. His teaching does contain a self-professed aesthetical dimension but the latter manifests on the plane of forms a particular aspect of the hikmah Maryamiyyah: ―God is beautiful and He loves beauty.‖ As for Schuon‘s openings to ―already existing traditions‖ other than Islam, they reflect a spiritual possibility corresponding to an exceptional degree of esoterism and universality.43 But the sophia perennis will never stem from any artificial and laborious combination: for the blossoming of the Schuonian synthesis, this primordial wisdom had to come first and to play the role of an ―organizing principle.‖
To understand this process, we also need to recall the distinction Schuon establishes between the two sources of the sophia perennis: (1) the horizontal effluence of grace and wisdom coming from the divinely inspired founder of a given religion, and transmitted historically by the tradition like a continuous flow; and (2) a vertical inspiration that Schuon compares to the falling of the rain and associates with Khidr or the Holy Virgin. In the second case, the Spirit will descend to illuminate a religious ―matter‖—originally more or less diverse and solidified— that is thereby essentialized and universalized. In his books, Schuon may alternatively speak as a Vedantist or a Sufi, when he addresses the question of the doctrine or the initiatory method but the notions and symbols potentially ―borrowed‖ are largely transformed because ultimately they serve as occasional vehicles for a sacred knowledge that transcends the limits of both Hinduism and Islam.
With respect to the doctrine, Schuon was blessed as a child by an intuitive knowledge of certain principles of the universe that nevertheless had to crystallize under the more geometrical and dogmatic influence of René Guénon. The French metaphysician gave him the essential concepts of Advaita. He encountered the same non-dualist doctrine again, at least under an elliptical form, while he was in Mostaghanem, among the foqara of the Sheikh Al-Alawi, through whom the Gnostic legacy of Ibn ‗Arabi—of the school of the wahdat alwujud—was communicated to him. At this moment of his life, it was however already a matter of confirmation, rather than actualization or discovery and the imprint was certainly more ontological than intellectual because it is the Hindu doctrine that always remained Schuon‘s starting point. In a memorial article on René Guénon and his intellectual legacy, Schuon declares that ―Guénon was quite right to declare that the Vedanta is the most direct expression of pure metaphysics‖ and that―no attachment to any non-Hindu tradition obliges us to ignore it or to pretend to ignore it.‖44 This does not mean however that Schuon is dependent on the particular positions of Shankara, who, as he reminds us, did not invent Vedanta but was only its providential spokesman. Schuon insists for instance in a quite unique manner on the interplay between the ―dimensions‖ of Atma and the manifested. 45 He also stresses the creative and theophanic power of Maya. By doing so, Schuon somehow departs from Shankara, for whom Maya is without origin and brings about existential ignorance (avidya). In what he writes about Maya, Schuon really stands on his own ground and this even though his conception of Maya has similarities with the views of the post-Shankarian Vivarana school,46 not to mention the Tantric doctrine of the Divine bi-unity.47 Concerning eschatological matters, Schuon adopts a more nuanced position than Shankara, arguing that, after the dropping of the body, the delivered soul keeps a heavenly form in the Brahma-loka till the pralaya.48 All this shows that for Schuon even Vedanta is only a means to express what he knows directly, thanks to the miracle of direct intellection.
If we turn to the orthopraxy of the Schuonian method, Schuon shares with the Sheikh Al-Alawi and the North African Shadhilis the insistence on dhikr as the center of the initiatory work. But his technique of meditation synthetically presented in the Stations of Wisdom49 has no direct equivalent within Sufism.50 It was revealed to him in 1942, almost a decade after the death of his master. At this time, he had a spiritual experience, which he accepted as a ―gift,‖ an inexhaustible revelation from God Himself and not from a human intermediary. Titus Burckhardt called it using an Islamic term, a nafath ar-Ruh. According to Jean-Baptiste Aymard, the descent of the ―primordial themes of meditation,‖ which in Schuon‘s view summarize all the ―stations‖ that a spiritual method may offer to realize, coincided with a renewed interest in Hinduism. In fact, their universal character became a point of disagreement with both Guénon and Valsan, especially because Schuon made it clear that their content should be replaced in a larger context than Islam alone. He often refers for instance to the Prayer of the Heart of the Eastern Church and to the Hindu Japa-yoga. In the Far East, Schuon frequently mentions Honen. The Japanese master is a preeminent figure of the Buddhist school of Pure Land. His invocatory path (nembutsu) that flourished in medieval Japan, finds its distant origin in China but Honen gave a new impulse to it, insisting more unilaterally on the trust in the mercy of the Buddha Amida and the saving power conveyed by his Name.52 Schuon‘s connection with this Buddha seems to have been very profound. While he was performing a khalwah of several days in Mostaghanem under the direction of the Sheikh Adda, Schuon saw with the Eye of the Heart golden images of this emissary of Mahayana Buddhism, side by side with Semitic prophets.53
As has already been mentioned, many of those who mistakenly believed that Schuon had created a kind of syncretism were focusing on his relationship with the Native American world. In fact, it is through Joseph Epes Brown that Schuon came into contact with Black Elk, a holy man of the Oglala Lakota. His personal friendship with the Sun Dance Chief Thomas Yellowtail lasted forty years till the death of the latter. Schuon was eventually adopted in the Lakota and Crow tribes and received the names of Wambali Ohitika (Brave Eagle) and Wichahpi Wiyakpa (Bright Star). What Schuon claims to have discovered in Native American Shamanism, and in its sacerdotal aspect personified by Black Elk and Yellowtail, are two things: (1) a spiritual antidote to the artificial and trivial ambiance of the modern world; (2) an opening to a contemplative and interiorizing experience of the divine Immanence.
Modern man has lost the consciousness of the ―metaphysical transparency of phenomena,‖ and this ability to see the archetypes in their effects may be restored in his eyes by the contact with ―virgin nature‖ and a primo-mythological tradition. The ―Indian days‖—the Native American dances that Schuon organized after his moving to Bloomington to honor Yellowtail—represented a mode of participation in this shamanic perspective, although they were never seen as new rites, corresponding rather to an existential and aesthetic complement offered to those vocationally attracted by the primordial ambiance of the Plains Indians.55 In ―Degrees and Scope of Theism,‖ Schuon also explains that ―the metaphysician, who after all is not as Shamanist, nonetheless shares in this way of looking at things: for him, everything is integrated into the universal Substance, hence into Existence and then into given Qualities, Faculties, or Functions for everything is Atma.‖56
To this, we should add that although Hinduism represents the most direct heritage of the Primordial Tradition, the Native American traditions, as with all ancient religions that have not fallen into a state of total decadence, are still able to communicate to the esoterist a primordial barakah, a perfume from the Golden Age itself. That is why for Schuon, to have been adopted by Indian tribes amounts symbolically speaking to having been adopted by the Primordial Tradition itself.
Considering the diversity of spiritual influences converging on Schuon, it seems at least misleading to depict him as a Sufi Sheikh in a non-Islamic land (dar al-harb) and to present his tariqah as an illustration of Tasawwuf’s adapting to non-Arab circumstances. This type of approach reflects an optical illusion that is likely to obscure who Schuon was and to distort what was essential in his message. On the contrary, if we see Schuon not as a Muslim saint but as a primordial sage many tensions will vanish and his function may even appear in a new light.

Part Three: The Sage and the Goddess

In the first and second parts of this article, we addressed some fears about Schuon‘s status as well as common misunderstandings about his teachings. Schuon was neither a new prophet nor a Muslim saint in the classical sense. The crucial contrast between the posture of a saint and the posture of a sage is described in the following poem:

With the true sage there is always holiness, But a holy man is not always a sage. Noble character they have in common; But different is the spirit‘s journey.
The saint is rooted in will and love; The sage, in knowledge and intelligence. Certainly, the saint also can have wisdom — There are many paths in the Spirit‘s land.

Schematically speaking, we may define a prophet, as the equivalent mutatis mutandis of a ―major‖ avatara like Rama or Krishna and as the transmitter of a divine dictat, ―a law-giving and obligatory Message of overriding force,‖ addressed to a whole sector of humanity. As far as he is concerned, the saint comes after the prophet. He is immersed in a religious climate and depends on an outward illumination and a preexistent revelation. What a saint receives are inspirations from Heaven or revelations of a secondary order.58 In the revelation as Schuon defines it, it is God who speaks whereas in the inspiration, the Holy ―Spirit guides man in accordance with the divine intention and on the basis of the capacities of the human receptacle.‖59 Saint Augustine in Christianity, Ghazzali in Islam, Ramanuja in Hinduism, were unmistakably saints of first rank but their role was not a priori to formulate the most pristine esoterism. The personality of a saintly man is dominated by the will and the emotional element. Reason operates only a posteriori to canalize the celestial influx. On the contrary, in the case of the sage, the ―driving force‖ of mystical inspiration is replaced by reason if he is only an ―earthly sage‖ like Aristotle or by intellectual intuition if he is a ―true sage‖ like Plato.60 This intuition, leading to transcendent ―knowledge,‖ springs from an inward and more or less independent source, from that immanent divine spark that is the Intellect.
All we know about Schuon indicates that he had the profile of a sage and according to a testimony emanating from one of his disciples, he claimed for himself a very specific function:
According to Frithjof Schuon, the sage comes before the saint in the spiritual hierarchy, and so immediately after the avatara himself.… Responding to questions about one of his poems on the Kalki-Avatara, he made the following statement: ―…as far as I am concerned, I am the seal of the sages, khatamu’l’hukama.‖
Before examining this enigmatic claim, we need to recall that many controversies have erupted about the Islamic doctrine of the seals, opposing Shiites to Sunnis and Sufis to theologians. If all the orthodox schools of Islam agree to see Muhammad as the ―seal of the prophets,‖ the existence and identity of a ―seal of the saints‖ who would close the cycle of the ―friends of God‖ have been fiercely debated. The first to introduce this notion was the 10th century Sufi saint Al-Hakim Al-Tirmidhi. Ibn ‗Arabi later made the distinction between two seals of sainthood: a ―seal of the universal sainthood‖ he identified with Jesus and a ―seal of the Muhammadan sainthood.‖ Sainthood is superior to prophethood but the prophets stand above the saints. Ibn ‗Arabi justified this paradox arguing that prophets too have realized holiness. They combine the outward perfection of the nubuwwah and the inward perfection of the walayah but their spiritual degree is veiled by their function because they incarnate the legalistic and outward religion.
To speak of a ―seal of the sages,‖ who would be like the compendium for the wisdom of the ages, 62 introduces a third concept in this Sufi cyclology. It suggests the existence of an intermediate sphere of wisdom (hikmah), of a barzakh between prophecy and holiness, occupied by the minor avataras of Shiva and the sages who have become ―their own law.‖ In Shi‘ism, it is Fatima who symbolizes the confluence of these two seas. She was both the daughter of Muhammad and the spouse of ‗Ali, the first of the holy Imams. But her traditional title of Maryam alkubar also shows that in the life of the prophet of Islam, she was like an avataric prolongation of the Holy Virgin and in the Schuonian perspective, this realm of immaculate wisdom may only belong to Mary, the feminine face of the Logos. It is under the mantle of the ―mother of all the prophets‖ and the ―substance of original holiness‖ that the major avataras, the Semitic prophets as well as the saints may gather in the eternal present.
It follows that in some respects the sphere of Mary is also the most universal. ―A holy man is not always a sage‖ but his wisdom necessarily originates in Her domain. Even the prophecy only exteriorizes the possibilities synthetically contained in the divine Sophia. Religion is a solidified wisdom. As for the sage who has drunk Her milk, his case shows that ―the return to God is inherent in the fact of existence,‖ that our being itself offers the way of returning all the way to pure Substance ―passing through the strata of our ontological reality.‖63 However, a veil separates the average man, whose intelligence is merely ―potential,‖
from the Reality of Truth. He needs a religious messenger to be saved from the samsaric wheel because he does not know that he bears everything within himself. But the sage knows this and follows a different path. The sage does not bring a religious Law to humanity. This mission belongs to the prophets. Nor does he exemplify moral perfections in the eyes of the believers like the saints. The true sage is a messenger of the Self and he lives and speaks in the name of the naked Truth.
Plato is an example of one of these providential masters of wisdom in the Western Antiquity, and Schuon had privately compared the Platonic message to his own. Whereas some traditionalist authors, following Guénon, denied the importance of Greek philosophy, reducing it to schematizing, freethinking and skepticism, Schuon singled out Plato, Plotinus and to a lesser degree Aristotle as authentic sages, as spokesmen of a path of knowledge opposed to Greek naturalism. These Ancient thinkers should not be included under the heading of rationalism, despite their rationalistic style of dialectic because they expressed by means of reason certainties ―seen‖ or ―lived‖ by the immanent Intellect that they communicated to their descendants in the Semitic world.
In the case of the highest sages however, this type of impulse—a contact with ancient traditions of wisdom either from Greece or from India—only serve to awaken latent truths, because they are already born with ―a state of knowledge.‖ Schuon‘s poems sometimes evoke explicitly the phenomenon of innate wisdom, probably because they are less technical and more direct than many of his metaphysical books. They transmit to the reader a ―being‖ and ―spiritual presence,‖ as well as original insights on his thinking and life. The following poem in particular resonates like a personal testimony: ―All that one finds in good old books/ Regarding Being, and the question of the universe, /God has inscribed in the substance of my heart.‖65 Schuon was intrinsically a ―pneumatics of jnanic type.‖ In a commemorative article about Guénon, 66 he explained that the pneumatic is in a way ―the ‗incarnation‘ of a spiritual archetype.‖ He ―does not ‗go forward‘ towards something ‗other than himself‘; he stays where he is in order to become fully what he himself is—namely his archetype—by ridding himself, one after the other, of veils or outer surfaces, shackles imposed by the ambience or perhaps by heredity‖ by ―means of ritual supports—‗sacraments,‘ one might say—not forgetting meditation and prayer.‖ His situation differs from that of ordinary men and Schuon frequently came back on how the pneumatic relates psychologically and spiritually to his environment. The difference between a pneumatic, a psychic and a somatic is quite clearly not of the sensorial order. The pneumatic is ―situated, by his nature, on the vertical and timeless axis—where there is no before or after.‖ He also perceives the cosmic containers as well as the play of the universal Maya. It follows that even in the torments of the samsara, he always remains perfectly ―himself,‖ at least in his innermost center, because he is aware of the unreality of the individual self and does not identify with his psychic substance. For him, what is the most concrete is the universal Self: pure Being, immaculate Consciousness, and infinite Bliss. The pneumatic may certainly feel emotions and even suffer but this does not really affect his contemplative state. In his eyes, our world resembles a broken mirror of Paradise and he continues to see things in their angelical prototypes and in a sort of simultaneity parallel to their phenomenality.
The born jnani is also orthodox by nature although he is ―more or less independent, not only with regard to the letter but also with regard to the Law‖ and, in his case, a fundamental deviation is inconceivable. Even when the pneumatic seems to have broken religious laws, his transgression is motivated by a more profound imperative: the fitra, his primordial and theomorphic nature. ―The real Gnostic‖ is finally the reverse of a mundane intellectual and he ―does not attribute any ‗state‘ to himself, for he is without ambition and without ostentation; he has a tendency rather—through an ‗instinct for holding back‘—to disguise his nature.‖ Visitors and disciples of Schuon have talked about Schuon‘s discernment in face of the cosmic shadows as well as his total absence of ambition. Some have even reported that he constantly discouraged— with more or less success—speculations about his ―state‖ among his community.67 Schuon‘s characterization as a ―pneumatic‖ can answer many of the questions about the outward irregularity of his spiritual path and can shed a new light on some incidents of his life when the transcendent archetype suddenly ―pierces through the contingent, individual envelope.‖
The quality of pneumatic comprises degrees as well as modes. Schuon mentions the difference between the pneumatics of jnanic and bhaktic types. Whereas in the former case, it is the light of the Truth that initially strikes the elect, bringing about an awakening made of clarity or evidence, in the latter case, Heaven attracts the soul by a supernatural love, and the life of the bhakta may be inaugurated by a spiritual wedding between the soul and the Spirit.68 Another important distinction can be established between pneumatics following a more masculine or a more feminine path, although the two are necessarily combined and Patrick Laude has remarked on an inner polarity of this order in Schuon‘s personality.69
This polarity corresponds to the Sufi concepts of tanzih and tashbih. Tanzih and tashbih can respectively be translated by ―remoteness‖ and ―comparison,‖ or ―exaltation‖ and ―similitude,‖ and ultimately ―transcendence‖ and ―immanence.‖ In Schuon‘s teaching, the tanzih aspect, expressed for the most part in his metaphysical and doctrinal writings of Vedantic or Sufi type, has been the most unanimously acclaimed. From this first perspective of transcendence and discontinuity, God is the Real and the world is illusory. According to the second and complementary perspective (tashbih), God is not only transcendent as Brahman but also immanent as divine Power (shakti). The world and its forms are the manifestations of the Principle that communicates to them a relative degree of reality. ―The existence of things‖ is derived from the Absolute; ―their containers, their diversity and their multiplicity, thus space, time, form, numbers are derived from the Infinite.‖ Finally ―their qualities, whether substantial or accidental are derived from Perfection.‖70 The first perspective of discontinuity between the Divine center and the circumference of the manifested is balanced by another, which corresponds geometrically speaking to the continuity between the center and the radius. If the All-Possibility prefigures the manifestation at the level of the Principle, God also makes Himself present in the world, directly as divine Logos and through the divine descents (avataras) as well as more indirectly in the creatures themselves.
In fact, the presence of this more feminine element within Schuon‘s jnanic perspective should not surprise us too much. As early as in Gnosis, Divine Wisdom, Schuon had explained that whereas in the case of a bhakta, a ―feminine‖ devotion is balanced and canalized by the more masculine religious orthodoxy provided by the traditional surrounding, the jnani follows an apparently more virile path that nevertheless requires a feminine complement associated with beauty, both at the level of the soul and the environment.71 In Schuon‘s life, the Virgin Mary, whose heavenly beauty is attested by the oldest Christian sources 72 as well as by the icons, initiated him into the secrets of Divine immanence. Schuon was always very interested by the meaning and alchemical power of sacred art but his writings and even his style unmistakably show a deeper awareness of what he called ―the metaphysical transparency of phenomena‖ after 1965. After his celestial adoption, Schuon also manifested a particular sensibility to the pacifying and interiorizing virtue of feminine beauty, a beauty that finds its prototype in the new Eve.
Jean-Baptiste Aymard has rightly stressed the affinities between Schuon and the medieval fidele d’amore, such as Dante in Christianity or Ruzbihan Baqli in Islam,73 their communality in terms of inspiration when they approach the mystery of the sacred femininity. In the case of the young Schuon, his unhappy love for a young girl called Madeleine in his autobiography amounted to a burning experience of beauty and femininity. The end of this story, which had been lived not as profane romance but as an initiatory trial, coincided with the revelation of the six themes of meditation in 1942. Having renounced the earthly woman, Schuon was subsequently initiated into her heavenly archetype by the celestial Virgin, of whom Madeleine was only a mundane image.
Considering Schuon‘s exaltation of the ―Eternal Feminine‖ to the degree of a divine hypostasis, we will insist here on a different connection and another religious gate to the mystery of Divine immanence and femininity. In many ways, Schuon‘s Virgin displays more the distinct attributes of a Hindu Goddess than those of a Semitic prophetess and this Asian influence becomes even clearer when we turn our attention to his paintings. As is well known since the publication of a number of books dedicated to his pictorial art74 in the 80‘s and 90‘s, Schuon was not only a metaphysician but also a gifted painter. The subject-matter of Schuon‘s art is, on the one hand, the Plain Indians‘ world, the sacerdotal and heroic figures of the Indian chiefs, and on the other hand, especially after his Marian adoption, the Virgin Mary and the divine and human femininity. About the latter paintings, Schuon seems to have acknowledged privately that they were the providential receptacle of some extra-semitic archetypes—shaktic to be more specific—, the tangible products of his most universal and primordial inspirations.
In my paintings of the Virgin, a tendency towards Hinduism, towards Shaktism if you will, manifests itself, and towards the Krita-Yuga, and finally towards the proto-Semitic world, which is echoed in the Song of Songs…this was not my prior intention; it
lies simply in the nature of things and likewise in the very kernel of my being.
These paintings may not directly concern his tariqah and Schuon explicitly forbade that they became a support of concentration or devotion. Their importance should not be underestimated however. In his representations of the Virgin and her child, their traditional image is universalized and essentialized, as the religious forms themselves in the contact of the religio perennis. The nudity of the mother of Jesus, unusual for a biblical figure, symbolizes in this esoteric context the nakedness of total truth. In most of Schuon‘s paintings, the eyes of the Virgin are closed, suggesting the mystery of inwardness and this passage from The Song of Songs: ―I am black but beautiful.‖ By their interiorizing beauty, these icons of the Virgin exercise a merciful and pacifying influence on the spectator. As James Cutsinger remarked, they communicate a kind of mystical state (hal) that would have remained purely private otherwise, and would have certainly been lost forever after Schuon‘s passing away. While irresistibly attracting our attention to their heavenly aura, these icons seem to have the miraculous ability to reverse the centrifugal tendency of our soul and to protect us from the influence of the lower Maya. In their presence, our hearts are capable of being cured from many secret poisons and the celestial vibrations they provoke seem to emanate directly from the nirvanic center of all things. Schuon wrote that avataras save not only by their message but also by their liberating beauty.76 Schuon‘s depictions of the Holy Virgin are like an open window on a blue and pristine sky, illuminated by the light of Atma. They invite us to a Platonic metanoia, possibly because Schuon did not portray the Virgin according the rules of religious art but as he saw her with the ―Eye of the Heart‖ in a form beyond confessional oppositions. Henry Corbin has studied in depth the phenomenon of heavenly visions and the role played by what he called the ―imaginal world‖ in the theosophy of Ibn ‗Arabi and in Persian mysticism. It has been remarked however that Corbin has a tendency to overestimate the possibilities of the subtle realm and to ignore the informal states of being. A strange limitation also leads the Iranologist to reject the Vedantic doctrine of the transpersonal Self as ―natural mysticism‖ or ―pantheism.‖ In Schuon‘s perspective, on the contrary, the presence of the Virgin is not restricted to a particular degree of contemplation. She is able to guide the soul through the liberating passage beyond the formal order because she symbolizes not only the beauty of the malakut but also the night of non-manifested (avyakta).
Schuon‘s Marian images were somehow prepared by a series of earlier representations of Pte San Win, the white buffalo calf woman who brought down the Sacred Pipe in the Lakota mythology. It is possibly less widely known that they were also prolonged by a series of yoginis and devis77 that Schuon painted mostly between 1980 and 1998. These female figures as well as the frequent references in his German poems to Abhinavagupta and Krishna clearly reflect Schuon‘s growing interest for the universe of the Agamas and the Tantras toward the end of his life.
Tantrism is often misrepresented in Western popular culture. Far from being reducible to hedonism, it gave birth, in the context of medieval Kashmir, to an original non-dualist school, whose perspective is surprisingly very close to Schuon‘s. The doctrine of the Trika, whose exponents were precisely Abhinavagupta and his disciple Ksemaraja, finds its origin in a late Shaivite revelation that claims to be more adapted to the disharmonious man of the kali yuga than the Vedas. The Shiva Sutras78 places the notion of Shakti at the heart of a cosmogonic process, presented in the light of an adamantine non-dualism, not entirely similar however to Shankara‘s. In this metaphysical system, Shiva and Shakti are not opposed like the Real and the unreal but they correspond to the two facets of Ultimate Reality. It is by the creative power of the Shakti, that Shiva, the absolute Consciousness unfolds the three fundamental hypostases—will (iccha), knowledge (jnana) and activity (kriya). At a later step, this divine interplay also initiates the procession of the tattvas that one may define as the macrocosmic and microcosmic degrees of reality. Shakti creates the world but she also reintegrates it into the Principle. At the time of Liberation, the individual returns to Shiva and realizes union with Him but for the Shaivists, the Supreme Identity cannot be attained by the mere act of renounciation but by the grace of the descent of the Shakti upon the sage.
As we said, Kashmiri Shaivism and Advaita Vedanta differ in several respects. The doctrine of the Trika does not see the world as an illusion but rather as the expression of God‘s Power. Its perspective is also more dynamic because it focuses on the creative and redeeming Energies operating within manifestation as well as on their prefiguration in the divine order. However, these differences did not prevent many sages and saints from recognizing the ultimate compatibility between the two schools. Beyond formal disagreements—possibly originating in a conflict of upayas within Hinduism itself—and a difference of mentality—ascetic in the case of Advaita, more alchemical for Kashmiri Shaivism—they both share a jnanic orientation. As spiritual paths, they also culminate in the same experience of the non-dual Absolute and are placed under the patronage of Shiva that the Hindu mythology portrays as simultaneously an ascetic and the spouse of the Goddess Parvati.
Advaita Vedanta and Tantric metaphysics are also intricately intertwined in the Goddess literature. Its underlying assumption is the identification of Mahadevi, the great Goddess synthesizing all the particular female deities of the Hindu pantheon, with the Maya of Vedanta, the Shakti of the Tantric Godhead and even with Brahman.79 In ―Degrees and Scope of Theism‖,80 Schuon has contrasted the masculine perspective of Semitic monotheism and the feminine perspective of Shaktism. The former sees man as the totality and woman as the part: Eve has been created from Adam and is only a portion of him. In this ―androtheist‖ perspective, a masculine God faces a feminine universe. By contrast for Shaktism, woman is the ―Mother‖ symbolizing the Infinite, the supra-formal as opposed to man who incarnates the limited, the manifested. In the onto-cosmological chain, She precedes the ―relatively Absolute‖ or the personal God 81 but She is also present at every step in the cosmogonic trajectory: at the level of Being as the efficient energy of the Isvara; in the archangelic realm as the trinity Sarasvati-Lakshmi-Parvati and below the manifested as the receptive substance (prakriti). In the spiritual life, She finally aids the shakta as
his ―Mother‖ and attracts him as ―Virgin,‖ personifying the celestial energy that allows man ―to enter into contact with the Divinity‖ and as well as the sacred knowledge (Brahma vidya) that confers ―a second birth.‖ 82 According to the Deva Gita, ―through her power of ignorance, She shows herself as the world, like a rope appearing as a serpent‖ and ―through her power of knowledge, She dissolves the world back into Herself‖ rescuing her devotees from ―the troubled ocean of the samsara.‖
For Ramakrishna to whom Schuon often refers, even the jnani adept of the Advaita cannot leave the realm of the universal relativity and ignorance without the assistance of her Grace.84 If in Islamic terms Schuon was a maryami, in Hindu terms he was not only an Advaitin but also a shakta like Ramakrishna and his unpublished autobiography frequently alludes to the presence of Hindu Goddesses. Schuon‘s dual reference to the Goddess and to Vedantic metaphysics may be disappointing for those unfamiliar with the non-Abrahamic traditions. But as we have suggested it finds more than a single anticipation in the land of the Sanatana Dharma. Not only do we find in Kashmiri Shaivism and in the Goddess tradition an identification of the Vedantic Maya with the feminine aspect of the Principle and a doctrine of the Divine Bi-unity but it may also be remarked that Schuon‘s insistence on the scalar nature of reality (Beyond-Being, Being, Existence) and the plurality of the divine hypostases (Absolute, Infinitude and Perfection) is much closer to the Kashmiri doctrine of the tattvas than to the Vedantic ―monism.‖ Both Schuon and Abhinavagupta see the Principle as simultaneously static and dynamic: profound peace and radiating Good, begetting the multiple degrees of being and consciousness, a vision that has already led some to reproach Schuon of giving too much weight to kataphatic expressions. Schuon also shares with Shaktism a certain trust in the Mercy of celestial femininity.
To this we should add that the spiritual meaning of beauty interests both Schuon and the master of the Trika. We have already mentioned Schuon‘s artistic gifts. It is less known that unlike Shankara, Abhinavagupta wrote in addition to his theological treatises, important commentaries on dance, music and literature, his major contribution to Indian aesthetic remain his doctrine of rasa.85 For him, as for Schuon, two sages whose point of departure is neither legalistic nor moralistic but the ―nature of things,‖ the listening to music, the performance of dance and the aesthetical contemplation, permit to assimilate—in a quasi-alchemical way—celestial qualities. Beauty not only attracts angelical influences but also communicates a spark of the divine Bliss (Ananda) as well as an intuition of the plenitude of Atma. Schuon once explained that ―in beauty man ‗realizes,‘ passively in his perception and externally in his production of it, that which he should himself be,‖86 providing a key for the understanding of the Hindu notion of darshan. The message of Beauty and the language of the Self do not compete with one another. They are like ―two opposing poles within the Godhead‘s spheres.‖

Shri Abhinavagupta was surrounded By devadassis, and with dance and music; Shri Shankara on the other hand was an ascetic, Who sought his happiness in solitude.
Two opposing poles within the Godhead‘s spheres —
And yet two human beings on this poor earth,
Often difficult to understand — but nonetheless united In One Truth, and at the same hearth. 87

Within the lineage of the ten avataras of Vishnu, it is Krishna, the guru of Arjuna in the Bhagavad-Gita who incarnates most directly the Tantric attitude. According to Schuon, when the Srimad Bhagavatam describes the rasa-lila, the dance of the gopis around Krishna, it alludes to the mystery of the Veil and the loss of individuality in ecstasy. ―Fundamentally every love is a search for the Essence or the lost Paradise‖88 and the human soul is like a gopi secretly burned by an unlimited desire for her Lord. It is however necessary to insist that Schuon‘s affinity with Tantric wisdom was confined to a purely contemplative and aesthetic level. By contrast with the techniques of the Kundalini-yoga, Schuon never cultivated the dynamic, energetic or even erotic aspect of the Shakti. He rather insisted on her dimension of maternal mercy or of ―platonic‖ beauty and he loved to repeat the maxim of the greatest among the Greek sages: ―Beauty is the splendor of the Truth.‖
Polemics inevitably surround to some degree the life of spiritual figures of first magnitude. It is even more true in a time of extreme confusion like ours, in which the prince of darkness makes his power felt more heavily than ever and in which human discernment is weaker than it was in previous ages. Our intention in this article was nevertheless to dispel some frequent misunderstandings that have obscured the message of Frithjof Schuon: the allegation that he claimed to be the prophet of a new religion and the distortions produced by the unilateral superimposition on his message of too narrow Islamic criteria. As we have argued, in our apocalyptical age, Frithjof Schuon was like the paracletic spokesman of the sophia perennis. He assumed the function of ―a sage for the times‖ and his message of primordiality, essentiality and universality has touched people with very diverse religious backgrounds. Seen from a Western perspective, he belonged to the sapiential lineage of Plato and the neo-Platonists: he was in the noble sense a philosopher, a lover of the Divine Sophia. From a Hindu viewpoint, he was intrinsically a Shaivist and a Shaktist, rather than a Vaishnavist, a man of jnana rather than religious observances. In his nature, the sense of Beauty and the devotion to the Goddess went hand in hand with the most pristine Vedantic non-dualism. As Schuon has repeated more than once, the religions revealed by the prophets and lived by the saints are not perfect because they are totally immersed within the domain of relativity. Even their celestial matrix is still included in the Maha moha or the―Relatively Absolute‖ and that is why sages exist. By breaking the outer shell of relativity, they open our hearts to ―the luminous realm of the Pure Spirit‖ that radiates from the One Self.

* * *

Life’s work

The work, a lifelong struggle—first Youthful dreams: the True, the Beautiful, The Sacred, and the Great. Then dreams Come true, that the Word might be heard.
All this amid the shadows—will it shine or not? Does destiny wish that the Word grow weary And weaker throughout life? Fiat Lux—– God willed that it should flourish and remain.
In the book of my message you have read
And ask: fromwhence resounds the Master‘s voice?
His substance is part Shankara, part Krishna—
Singing gnosis is the primordial essence.

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