Frithjof Schuon on Culturism

Genius is nothing unless determined by a spiritual perspective.

Frithjof Schuon1

One manifestation of the anti-traditional outlook, is the cult of genius and the
phenomenon of what Frithjof Schuon calls “culturism”. In “To Have a Center”, one of
his most arresting essays in which he directly addresses some specifically modern
cultural movements, Schuon articulates his governing theme:
We live in a world which on the one hand tends to deprive men of their center, and on
the other hand offers them — in place of the saint and the hero — the cult of the
“genius”. Now a genius is all too often a man without a center, in whom this lack is
replaced by a creative hypertrophy. To be sure, there is a genius proper to normal,
hence balanced and virtuous, man; but the world of “culture” and “art for art’s sake”
accepts with the same enthusiasm normal and abnormal men, the latter being
particularly numerous . . . in that world of dreams or nightmares that was the
nineteenth century.2

That many of these 19th century geniuses led unhappy and desperate lives only adds to
their prestige and strengthens the “seduction, indeed the fascination, which emanates
from their siren songs and tragic destinies”. The “unbridled subjectivism” and the
“split and heteroclite psychism”3 of many of the century’s geniuses often induced
melancholy and despair, sometimes psychopathology and insanity. Now, Schuon
readily concedes that profane genius can, “in any human climate”, be “the medium of
a cosmic quality, of an archetype of beauty or greatness”, in which case we can respect
at least some of its productions even though they lie outside tradition. As he writes
elsewhere:
Modern art — starting from the Renaissance — does include some more or less
isolated works which, though they fit into the style of their period, are in a deeper
sense opposed to it and neutralize its errors by their own qualities.4

However, what we most often witness in the last few centuries is a “useless profusion
of talents and geniuses” driven by a “humanistic narcissism with its mania for
individualistic and unlimited production”.5 Humanism promotes a certain dynamism
and a “fruitless moral idealism” which “depends entirely on a human ideology”.

1 F. Schuon, Art from the Sacred to the Profane, ed. C. Schuon, Bloomington:
World Wisdom, 2007, p. 41.
2 F. Schuon, To Have a Center, Bloomington: World Wisdom, 1990, 8. (A Virgil, a
Dante, a Fra Angelico furnish examples of normal men blessed with a creative
genius.)
3 F. Schuon, To Have a Center, p. 9.
4 F. Schuon, Art from the Sacred to the Profane, p. 15.
5 F. Schuon, To Have a Center, p. 10.
 Schuon goes on to illustrate his theme with reference to the lives and productions of
a gallery of 19th century artists, among them Beethoven, Wagner, Rodin, Nietzsche,
Wilde, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Ibsen, Bizet, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky —
all figures whose prodigious talents were turned astray by an impoverished
environment, which is not to deny the traces of incidental beauty and grandeur which
can be found in many of their works. Let us briefly consider Schuon’s remarks on a
few representative cases. Firstly, Beethoven:
Despite the fact that Beethoven was a believer, he was inevitably situated on the
plane of humanism, hence of “horizontality”. And though there was nothing morbid
about him, we note the characteristic disproportion between the artistic work and the
spiritual personality; characteristic, precisely, for genius arising from the cult of man,
thus from the Renaissance and its consequences. There is no denying what is
powerful and profound about many of Beethoven’s musical motifs, but, all things
considered, a music of this sort should not exist; it exteriorizes and hence exhausts
possibilities which ought to remain inward and contribute in their own way to the
contemplative scope of the soul. In this sense, Beethoven’s art is both an indiscretion
and a dilapidation, as is the case with most post-Renaissance artistic manifestations. 6

And all this despite the fact that Beethoven, compared to other geniuses, was “a
homogeneous man, hence ‘normal’, if we disregard his demiurgic passion for musical
exteriorization”. Schuon also notes that
Whereas in Bach or Mozart musicality still manifests itself with faultless
crystallinity, in Beethoven there is something like the rupture of a dam or an
explosion; and this climate of cataclysm is precisely what people appreciate. 7

Rodin provides an instance of another “powerful and quasi-volcanic” genius,

“direct heir to the Renaissance” in his titanesque “carnal and tormented” productions,
reminiscent of ancient naturalism and the “sensual cult of the human body”. 8 Victor
Hugo, on the other hand, is no more than a “bombastic and long-winded spokesman of
French romanticism” who “puffs himself up and finally becomes hardened in the
passionate projection of himself”9 (a story repeated many times in modern “culture”!).
There are others, like Ibsen and Strindberg, who become spokesmen for “a thesis that
is excessive, revolutionary, subversive, and in the highest degree individualistic and
anarchic”:
This kind of talent — or of genius, as the case may be — makes one think of children
who play with fire, or of Goethe’s sorcerer’s apprentice: these people play with
everything, with religion, with the social order, with mental equilibrium, provided
they can safeguard their originality; an originality which, retrospectively, shows itself
to be a perfect banality, because there is nothing more banal than fashion, no matter
how clamorous.10

6 F. Schuon, To Have a Center, pp. 12-13.

7 F. Schuon, To Have a Center, p. 13n.
8 F. Schuon, To Have a Center, 13-14. In some sense Rodin is heir to the
“blustering and carnal paintings of a Rubens”; Art from the Sacred to the Profane, p.
39.
9 F. Schuon, To Have a Center, p. 20.
10 F. Schuon, To Have a Center, p. 20.
 To turn to one of the more formidable figures of the century, Nietzsche was yet
another “volcanic genius”:
Here, too, there is a passionate exteriorization of an inward fire, but in a manner that
is both deviated and demented; we have in mind here, not the Nietzschean
philosophy, which taken literally is without interest, but his poetical work, whose
most intense expression is in part his Zarathustra. What this highly uneven book
manifests above all is the violent reaction of an a priori profound soul against a
mediocre and paralyzing cultural environment; Nietzsche’s fault was to have only a
sense of grandeur in the absence of all intellectual discernment. Zarathustra is
basically the cry of a grandeur trodden underfoot, whence comes the heart-rending
authenticity — grandeur precisely — of certain passages; not all of them, to be sure,
and above all not those which express a half-Machiavellian, half-Darwinian
philosophy, or minor literary cleverness. Be that as it may, Nietzsche’s misfortune,
like that of other men of genius, such as Napoleon, was to be born after the
Renaissance and not before it; which indicates evidently an aspect of their nature, for
there is no such thing as chance.11

Goethe, a well-balanced man with a “lofty and generous” mind, was another victim of
the epoch “owing to the fact that humanism in general and Kantianism in particular
had vitiated his tendency towards a vast and finely-shaded wisdom” and made him,
paradoxically, “the spokesman of a perfectly bourgeois ‘horizontality’.”12
The 19th century novelists furnish many instances of “a problematic type of talent
led astray from its true vocation”: whereas in medieval times narratives were inspired
by myths, legends, and religious and chivalrous ideals, in the modern novel they
become “more and more profane, even garrulous and insignificant”. Their authors
lived only a vicarious existence through their characters: “A Balzac, a Dickens, a
Tolstoy, a Dostoevsky lived on the fringe of themselves, they gave their blood to
phantoms, and they incited their readers to do the same . . . with the aggravating
circumstance that these others were neither heroes nor saints and, besides, never
existed.” Furthermore:
These remarks can be applied to the whole of that universe of dreams which is called
“culture”: flooded by literary opium, siren songs, vampirizing, and — to say the least
— useless production, people live on the fringe of the natural world and its
exigencies, and consequently on the fringe — or at the antipodes — of the “one thing
needful”. The nineteenth century — with its garrulous and irresponsible novelists, its
poètes maudits, its creators of pernicious operas, its unhappy artists, in short with all
its superfluous idolatries and all of its blind allies leading to despair — was bound to
crash against a wall, the fruit of its own absurdity; thus the First World War was for
the belle époque what the sinking of the Titanic was for the elegant and decadent
society that happened to be on board, or what Reading Goal was for Oscar Wilde,
analogically speaking.13

Then, too, there are the “unhappy painters”, such as Van Gogh and Gauguin, both
“bearers of certain incontestable values” but whose work, “despite the prestige of the
style”, is marred by “the lack of discernment and spirituality”. They also dramatize the
tragedy of “normally intelligent men who sell their souls to a creative activity which
no one asks of them . . . who make a religion of their profane and individualistic art

11 F. Schuon, To Have a Center, p. 15.

12 F. Schuon, To Have a Center, p. 16.
13 F. Schuon, To Have a Center, p. 17.
and who, so to speak, die martyrs for a cause not worth the trouble”. 14 (Gauguin is a
particularly interesting case, given the fact that Schuon’s own paintings are somewhat
reminiscent, in both subject matter and style, of Gauguin’s.) In another essay Schuon
alludes to artworks which, to some degree, escape the limitations and distortions of the
age:
Of famous or well-known painters the elder Brueghel’s snow scenes may be quoted
and, nearer to our day, Gauguin, some of whose canvases are almost perfect, Van
Gogh’s flower paintings, Douanier Rousseau with his exotic forests akin to folk
painting, and, among our contemporaries, Covarrubias with his Mexican and
Balinese subjects. We might perhaps also allude to certain American Indian painters
whose work shows, through a naturalistic influence, a vision close to that of the
ancient pictography. Conversely, equivalents of the positive experiments of modern
art can be found in the most varied of traditional art, which proves not only that these
experiments are compatible with the universal principles of art, but also that — once
again — ”there is nothing new under the sun.”15

Returning to “To Have a Center”: Schuon goes on to describe the depredations of

humanism and the cult of genius in several other fields of “cultural production”,
including the theatre, philosophy, and the darker recesses of Romanticism, as well as
discussing the ostensible lack of “culture” (as it is understood in the modern West)
amongst non-literate peoples. It is worth taking close note of the following remarks:
A particularly problematic sector of culture with a humanist background is
philosophical production, where naïve pretension and impious ambition become
involved in the affairs of universal truth, which is an extremely serious matter; on
this plane, the desire for originality is one of the least pardonable sins. . . . The most
serious reproach we can make concerning the general run of these “thinkers” is their
lack of intuition of the real and consequently their lack of a sense of proportion; or
the short-sightedness and lack of respect with which they handle the weightiest
questions human intelligence can conceive, and to which centuries or millennia of
spiritual consciousness have provided the answer.16

The brief account above perhaps suggests that Schuon makes a blanket
condemnation of modern culture; this is not quite the case. What is unequivocally
condemned is a kind of humanistic ideology of “culturism” — but Schuon remains
acutely sensitive to those qualities of intelligence and beauty which still appear in
various artworks, despite the mediocre and spiritually stifling cultural milieu in which
they appear, and which bear witness to the artist’s nobility of soul even when this is
compromised by the false idol of “art for art’s sake”. Readers who turn to the essay in
full will find there a carefully nuanced treatment of the subject. However, if “it is not
easy to have completely unmixed feelings on the subject of profane ‘cultural’ genius”,
Schuon’s general case against humanistic culture is implacable:
Humanistic culture, insofar as it functions as an ideology and therefore as a religion,
consists essentially in being unaware of three things: firstly, of what God is, because
it does not grant primacy to Him; secondly, of what man is, because it puts him in the
place of God; thirdly, of what the meaning of life is, because this culture limits itself
to playing with evanescent things and to plunging into them with criminal

14 F. Schuon, To Have a Center, p. 19.

15 F. Schuon, Art from the Sacred to the Profane, p. 15.
16 F. Schuon, To Have a Center, pp. 21-22.
 unconsciousness. In a word, there is nothing more inhuman than humanism, by the
fact that it, so to speak, decapitates man.17

All of the “-isms” that have been under discussion as well as countless other modernist
ideologies with which they consort, amount to bogus philosophies because they betray
our real nature. And these ideologies are everywhere in the contemporary world. It is
for this reason that Schuon writes, “It is necessary to reject the modern world, its
errors, its tendencies, its trivialities”.18 Of the countless passages in his writings which
refute these degraded views of the human condition and which affirm our real nature,
here is one with which to conclude:
Man is spirit incarnate; if he were only matter, he would be identified with the feet; if
he were only spirit, he would be the head, that is, the Sky; he would be the Great
Spirit. But the object of his existence is to be in the middle: it is to transcend matter
while being situated there, and to realize the light, the Sky, starting from this
intermediary level. It is true that the other creatures also participate in life, but man
synthesizes them: he carries all life within himself and thus becomes the spokesman
for all life, the vertical axis where life opens onto the spirit and where it becomes
spirit. In all terrestrial creatures the cold inertia of matter becomes heat, but in man
alone does heat become light.19

[Modified excerpt from Chapter 14 of Frithjof Schuon and the

Perennial Philosophy, by Harry Oldmeadow, Bloomington: World
Wisdom, 2012.]

17 F. Schuon, To Have a Center, p. 37.

18 Frithjof Schuon, unpublished writings, courtesy of World Wisdom.
19 F. Schuon, The Feathered Sun: Plains Indians in Art and Philosophy,
Bloomington: World Wisdom, 1990, p. 16.