Life and works
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 18 June 1907 | Born in Basel, Switzerland, son of a German violinist.[3] |
| 1920 | After his father's death, moves with his mother to Mulhouse, in French Alsace.[3] |
| 1930 | Settles in Paris, where he works and deepens his study of Arabic and of Eastern doctrines.[3] |
| 1933 | Travels to Mostaganem, Algeria, enters Islam and spends about four months at the zawiya of the Sufi shaykh Ahmad al-Alawi, from whom he receives initiation (the date per the estate's site; other reconstructions place the departure from Europe in late 1932).[3] |
| 1935 | Publishes his first book, in German: Leitgedanken zur Urbesinnung (Primordial Meditation).[3] |
| 1941 | Settles in Lausanne, Switzerland, his base for nearly four decades.[3] |
| 1948 | Publishes De l'Unité transcendante des religions, his first and best-known book in French, the classic formulation of the perennialist thesis.[3] |
| 1949 | Marries Catherine Feer; obtains Swiss citizenship shortly afterwards.[3] |
| 1959 and 1963 | Travels to the American West at the invitation of Indigenous friends; on the 1959 visit he is adopted by the Sioux (and, in 1984, by the Crow).[3] |
| 1970s ≈ | Publishes mature works such as Logic and Transcendence, Form and Substance in the Religions and Esoterism as Principle and as Way.[3] |
| 1980 | Emigrates with his wife to the United States, settling in Bloomington, Indiana, near a community of disciples; in the first years there publishes From the Divine to the Human, To Have a Center and Roots of the Human Condition.[3] |
| 1991 | Becomes the target, in Bloomington, of accusations taken to a grand jury on the complaints of a former disciple; the prosecution dropped the charges shortly afterwards — an episode documented by the historian Mark Sedgwick in Against the Modern World (2004) and discussed on his academic blog.[5] [4] |
| 5 May 1998 | Dies in Bloomington, Indiana.[3] |
Reception in the COF
Present in 55 of the 589 transcription files of the Curso Online de Filosofia; 14 lectures engage him substantially (5 or more mentions). The most engaged lectures:
This section documents what Olavo said and when — never what the philosopher "really" meant. Characterizations are Olavo’s, tied to a lecture by number and date.
| Lecture (aula) | Date | Mentions |
|---|---|---|
| 209 | 2013-06-29 | 35 |
| 15 | 2009-07-18 | 32 |
| 41 | 2010-01-16 | 17 |
| 223 | 2013-10-12 | 17 |
| 218 | 2013-08-31 | 16 |
| 241 | 2014-03-01 | 13 |
| 279 | 2015-01-17 | 13 |
| 94 | 2011-02-12 | 12 |
| 584 | — | 10 |
| 258 | 2014-08-02 | 7 |
| 530 | — | 6 |
| 28 | 2009-10-17 | 5 |
| 43 | 2010-01-30 | 5 |
| 220 | 2013-09-14 | 5 |
| 10 | 2009-06-13 | 4 |
A dash in the date column means the transcription file carries no verified date — an undated file, not an undated lecture. Counts are accent-insensitive, word-boundary matches over the public community transcription corpus.[1] [2]
References
- COF — community transcriptions of the Curso Online de Filosofia (585 lectures) — Community transcription repository (upstream declares CC0 for the transcription work; the lectures remain the estate's)
- COF em Áudio — lecture audio collection — Internet Archive (community upload)
- Frithjof Schuon — Biography — fschuon.info (Schuon estate/circle site — perennialist perspective, labeled as such)
- Traditionalists: New website and new videos about Schuon (12 Oct 2020) — Traditionalists blog, Mark Sedgwick (academic historian of Traditionalism — independent/critical perspective)
- Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century (Mark Sedgwick, OUP, 2004) — Oxford University Press (academic study — independent/critical perspective)