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To Have a Center Library of Traditional Wisdom Frithjof Schuon 9780941532099 Books

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To Have a Center Library of Traditional Wisdom Frithjof Schuon 9780941532099 Books

Many things are well stated. If you can get past his repeated statements that females are seriously limited spiritually or that if they want salvation they must go through a male. I have had it with the perenial philosophy series.They claim to be old and traditional. However they represent the traditional from India, Islam, and Judea-Christian almost exclusively. I abhor their view on females and ;on nature. There is a tradition that represents both, but they do not discuss that. A balanced world view is completely absent.


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To Have a Center Library of Traditional Wisdom Frithjof Schuon 9780941532099 Books Reviews

Frithjof Schuon is simultaneously the greatest and most frustrating writer I have ever encountered. Greatest, because stylistically he is unsurpassed by anyone in the field he writes in, which perhaps is best called comparative religion. It takes a considerable background in this area to be able to read him as he should be read, for he is a writer who never talks down to his readers and supposes them, in principle at least, to have as much breadth and depth of both intelligence and spirit as he himself does (though of course there are very few who do). I have never held it against him that his disciples place him on such an absurdly high pedestal since the man himself had no egoism about it - obviously he would not be what he was, if he did. And, in fact, much of his work is of such stunningly high literary and philosophical quality it is difficult not to find oneself gilding the lily by gushing about it. Still one can only find one's eyes rolling heavenward when sycophants hang superlatives on his every minor work or half baked opinion.

He frustrates me simply because he invariably leaves me wanting more, but for the wrong reasons. He seems to write about everything except the most essential things in the primordial religion, namely the numerical, mythological and astronomical canon that underlies all the axial religions and of which they are only dim copies (like other Traditionalists he underestimates the significance of Egypt, Babylon and Pythagoreanism, which are the basis of the true primordial religion). Almost all his books, this one included, are essay collections with only a slight attempt at a theme in tying them together. Being an amateur artist and poet of sorts Schuon lacked the mindset to write full length studies, so different in requirements from the poet's brain. He wrote in bits and pieces about a diffuse variety of abstract and abstruse topics, some of which are of only specialized or academic interest. About every third page he makes some astoundingly deep, clear, penetrating insight that could only have come from him, but one must slog through some marginal material, the ubiquitous overlap and incidental irrelevancies to ever find these things.

In addition Schuon, like Guenon, Evola and others who purport to represent the perennial philosophy, occasionally misinterprets various things within religions he does not know from the inside out and similarly mistakes his own opinions for the Tradition (all of which which is inevitable when interpreting myths or philosophies expressed in words, which is why I prefer the mathematical precision of the Platonic approach to the literary approach of the Traditionalists). Some of his opinions are simply wrong, underinformed or misinformed, such as his description in this book of Einstein as a great mathematician (he was a relatively poor one who needed Minkowski to turn his ideas into formulas), or his equally pedestrian and ignorant opinions of Lincoln and various minor artists given here. And like Guenon, he can go too far in rationalizing discrepancies and omissions contained within various religions, in order to link them to traditional metaphysics. This is especially true when it comes to his pet favorite, the religion of the Plains Indians - which Schuon perhaps had a romanticized notion of because of his reading of the juveniles of Karl May, a vice shared by many German boys of his generation including both Einstein and Hitler.

Paradoxically, this book, which is rather down to earth for a Schuon book (who is ordinarily the most humorless ivory-tower type of writer imaginable), is actually one of my favorites despite being possibly his most opinionated work because here he at least gives us something to really sink our teeth into. One thing I always wished for was for Schuon, who is forever dropping hints about different aspects of Western culture and its esotericism such as geometry, astronomy, typology, mythology, art and so on to give us an extended look into his actual views on such things. This book comes close to doing so, particularly in the opening two essays, the first of which gives the book its title. The only other book of his like this is Language of the Self, which is nominally about Hinduism and as such defends the caste system in reprints of his two essays about race and caste, which are the meat of the little out of print book titled after them (which is quite mild and commonsensical, but would no doubt be considered politically incorrect in this age of modernist deviation). That book also covers art and includes more random, unrelated essays, like all his collections. Someone should package the pertinent essays from these two books together in one volume for a real "theme" book that would be a nice introduction to Schuon, but that's the problem with all his stuff - the better and more relevant work is scattered at random over all his books.

If only Schuon had been more focused, less like Shankara and more like Plato, or if his editors had been more demanding, he likely would have been the single outstanding religious writer of the 20th century. As it is we are each of us left to peruse these wonderfully well written essay collections over and over as best we can and assemble from them "books" of our own devising, as Schuon, like a poet, ever traces the same circles around and around the truth, never quite lighting on it...
I've been an admirer of Schuon for many years. I find his comments on esotericism to be some of the most sublime and thought-provoking to be found in print. In this work we are moving somewhat off the subject of esoteric religion per se and moving into the realm of the development of culture, and cultures.
Readers of Schuon's other works will recognize this as one of his favorite topics, and in this book he allows himself the space to tackle the subject in depth. In general, Schuon is in agreement with Guenon regarding the decline of culture, and particularly Western culture, holding that for various reasons modern Western culture has become truly "pagan." He then proceeds to dissect the phenomenon of identifying "genius" and what it constitutes, and indeed it is particularly interesting to consider that the idea of genius seems to be one that is a Western preserve.
The part when I began wondering whether I was willing to keep pace with Schuon, however, was when he started dissecting individual examples of Western "genius", and serving up his opinion on the quality (or lack of it) in their work. I am not at all comfortable with the idea of consigning artists like Tolstoy and Balzac to the rubbish bin, mainly apparently because they were novelists and were very good at it, while extolling composers like Georges Bizet for his presumed use of a musical tradition dating back to the troubadors.
I won't say that Schuon's comments weren't interesting; interesting enough, in fact, for me to question my own taste in books, painting and music somewhat, but in general I have to say that while it would have been interesting to sit down with Schuon and discuss all these things, this book seemed to me to pontificate a bit too much on particulars.
Many things are well stated. If you can get past his repeated statements that females are seriously limited spiritually or that if they want salvation they must go through a male. I have had it with the perenial philosophy series.They claim to be old and traditional. However they represent the traditional from India, Islam, and Judea-Christian almost exclusively. I abhor their view on females and ;on nature. There is a tradition that represents both, but they do not discuss that. A balanced world view is completely absent.