Like them, he affirmed the reality of an absolute Principle – God – from which the universe emanates, and maintained that all divine revelations, despite their differences, possess a common essence: one and the same Truth.

He also shared with them the certitude that man is potentially capable of supra-rational knowledge, and undertook a sustained critique of the modern mentality severed, according to him, from its traditional roots.

Following Plato, Plotinus, Adi Shankara, Meister Eckhart, Ibn Arabī and other metaphysicians, Schuon sought to affirm the metaphysical unity between the Principle and its manifestation.

[citation needed] At the end of 1932 he completed his first book, Leitgedanken zur Urbesinnung, which would be published in 1935 and later translated into English under the title Primordial Meditation: Contemplating the Real.

His desire to leave the West, whose modern values were so contrary to his nature, combined with his growing interest in Islam, prompted him to go to Marseilles, the great port of departure for the East.

Thus it was that in 1959 and again in 1963, at the invitation of their Indian friends, the Schuons journeyed to the American West, where they visited various Plains tribes and had the opportunity to witness many aspects of their sacred traditions.

His reverence for the Virgin Mary has been studied in detail by American professor James Cutsinger, who relates the two episodes in 1965 when Schuon experienced an especial Marian grace.

[30] According to Patrick Laude, Schuon became known, through his many books, articles and letters, "as the principal spokesman of the intellectual current sometimes referred to in English speaking countries as perennialism", or the Traditionalist School.

[23] During these sojourns, Schuon and some of his followers organized what they called "Indian Days", in which Native American dances were performed,[33] leading some to accuse him of practising ritual nudity.

[34] These gatherings were understood by disciples as a sharing in Schuon's personal insights and realization, not as part of the initiatic method he transmitted, centered on Islamic prayer and the dhikr.

A preliminary investigation was begun, but the chief prosecutor concluded that there was no proof, noting that the plaintiff was of extremely dubious character and had been previously condemned for making false statements in another similar affair in California.

Doch diesmal legt sich meine Feder nieder, Denn es gibt andres Sinnen, andre Pflichten; Wie dem auch sei, was wir auch mögen tun: Lasst uns dem Ruf des Höchsten Folge leisten – Lasst uns in Gottes tiefem Frieden ruhn.

[46] In his writings, Schuon's principal themes are "essential and hence universal metaphysics with its cosmological and anthropological ramifications, spirituality in the broadest sense, intrinsic morals and aesthetics, traditional principles and phenomena", religions and their esotericisms, sacred art.

[50] According to Harry Oldmeadow, this primordial truth or wisdom has "carried many names: Philosophia Perennis, Lex Aeterna, Hagia Sophia, Dīn al-Haqq, Akālika Dhamma, Sanātana Dharma", etc.

[51] Schuon points out that primordial wisdom is expressed in the work of Adi Shankara, Pythagoras, Plato, Plotinus and several other representatives of quintessential esoterism.

[59][60] The presence of the three superior degrees in man "made in the image of God" confers upon him the possibility of a knowledge that transcends the limitations of subjectivity, thus in principle allowing him to "see things as they are", that is, objectively: this is gnosis.

[61] As did Plato in ancient Greece, Adi Shankara in Hinduism, Meister Eckhardt and St Gregory Palamas in Christianity and Ibn Arabī in Islam – to name some examples –, Schuon attests that the essential discernment in metaphysics is that between the Real and the non-real (the illusory), Ātmā and Māyā.

[63] As St Augustine reminds us, it is in the nature of the Good (Agathôn) to radiate,[64] hence the projection of Māyā, which is simultaneously divine (Īshvara), celestial (Buddhi and Svarga) and "earthly", the latter including the domain of transmigration (samsâra).

[102][103] This discernment would remain purely mental[104] in the absence of concentration on the Real through rites and prayer,[105][106] i.e. without an effective link with God, the Sovereign Good,[104] based on an authentic piety and sufficient detachment from the ego and from the world.

[107] The way towards God, as Schuon points out, "always involves an inversion: from outwardness one must pass to inwardness, from multiplicity to unity, from dispersion to concentration, from egoism to detachment, from passion to serenity.

[121]For Schuon, humility, charity and veracity, that is to say effacement of the ego, gift of self and attachment to truth, are essential virtues, corresponding to the three stages of the spiritual path: purification, expansion and union.

[133] Summarizing Schuon's thought, Seyyed Hossein Nasr reminds us that it was in Europe, during the Renaissance, that the "modernist" or reductionist vision of the human condition and the universe took shape, before it affected the other continents a few centuries later.

[134] By reducing man more and more to his rational and animal aspects, to the detriment of his spiritual dimension and the purpose of earthly life,[134] modernism has influenced philosophy as much as religion, science or art.

[135] According to Schuon, its main characteristics are rationalism, which denies the possibility of a supra-rational knowledge, materialism, according to which only matter gives meaning to life, psychologism, which reduces the spiritual and the intellectual to the psychic,[136] skepticism, relativism, existentialism, individualism, progressivism, evolutionism, scientism and empiricism, without forgetting agnosticism and atheism.

[141] This conception of a universe which ignores as much the principle of "creative emanationism" as much as that of the "hierarchy of the invisible worlds", has engendered "that most typical offspring of the modern spirit", the theory of evolution, with its corollary: the illusion of "human progress".

[145] Along with Ananda Coomaraswamy and Titus Burckhardt,[146] Frithjof Schuon reminds us that "sacred art is first of all the visible and audible form of Revelation and then also its indispensable liturgical vesture".

[148] James Cutsinger emphasizes that, for Schuon, an art is sacred "not through the personal aims of the artist, but through its content, its symbolism, and its style, that is, through objective elements", which must respect the canonical rules specific to the religion of its author.

[149][150] The latter, according to Martyn Amugen quoting Schuon, must be "sanctified or in a state of grace" because the language of the sacred "cannot spring simply from profane tastes, nor from genius, but must proceed essentially out of religion",[151] which "cannot be replaced, far less can it be surpassed, by human resources".

What is in itself noble in nature is good for us only in its function as a support for the supernatural; cultivated apart from God, it readily loses its nobility and becomes a humiliating fatuity, as the stupidity and ugliness of worldly nudism precisely prove".

[169] Schuon was a frequent contributor to the quarterly journal Studies in Comparative Religion (along with Guénon, Coomaraswamy, Burckhardt, Nasr, Lings, and many others) which dealt with religious symbolism and the Traditionalist perspective.