Mateus Soares de Azevedo

Mateus Soares de Azevedo (born 1959) is a Brazilian historian of religions, Islamologist, and journalist.

Biography

Mateus Soares de Azevedo has a graduate degree in international relations from George Washington University and holds a Masters degree in History of religions from the University of São Paulo, with a thesis on the present relevance of the Perennial philosophy.

He is the author of seven books on the esoteric and mystical dimensions of Christianity and Islam, and of more than 60 articles and essays dealing with the importance of traditional religion and spirituality in the contemporary world, several of them translated into English, French, and Spanish.

His most recent book, in English, is Men of a Single Book: Fundamentalism in Islam, Christianity, and Modern Thought (United States, World Wisdom, 2010), a critique both of religious and anti-religious fundamentalism; the later represented specially by polemicists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

In Portuguese, his latest book is Ocultism and Religion: in Freud, Jung, and Mircea Eliade, co-authored with the Australian author and university professor Harry Oldmeadow.^[1]

Soares de Azevedo lived in London, England, in the 1980s, where he experienced the intellectual impact of the work of French metaphysician René Guénon. The Crisis of the Modern World, The Reign of Quantity and Symbols of Sacred Science, three of Guénon's classics, transformed his way of seeing reality, as they expound a profound critique of modern materialism and relativism from a purely metaphysical perspective.

In the 1990s he lived in Washington, D.C., where he was overwhelmed by the message of the German-Swiss metaphysician and guide of souls Frithjof Schuon. Schuon went even further in the critique of modern mentality, and added to Guénon's rigorously theoretical approach, a "practical" alternative to modern scepticism, teaching how to think and to live spiritually in the cold and dry hopelessness of modern secularist societies. He absorbed elements both from Guénon and Schuon in his works such as Men of a Single Book and Iniciación al Islam y al Sufism.^[2]

Soares de Azevedo is the editor of two anthologies published in the United States. The first is Ye Shall Know The Truth: Christianity And The Perennial Philosophy,^[3] featuring works by Frithjof Schuon, René Guénon, Titus Burckhardt and other perennialists. The second is Remembering in a World of Forgetting: Thoughts on Tradition and Postmodernism, a collection of the most important essays by the British perennialist author William Stoddart.^[4]

Bibliography

Books

• Men of a Single Book: Fundamentalism in Islam, Christianity, and Modern Thought (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2010) ISBN 9781933316468
• Ye Shall Know the Truth: Christianity and the Perennial Philosophy (Bloomington: World Wisdom, 2005) ISBN 0941532690
• Ocultismo e Religião: em Freud, Jung e Mircea Eliade (São Paulo: Ibrasa, 2011. With Harry Oldmeadow) ISBN 9788534803366
• A Inteligência da Fé: Cristianismo, Islã e Judaísmo (Rio de Janeiro: Nova Era, 2006) ISBN 8577010457 ^[5]
• Iniciación al Islam y Sufismo (Barcelona: Ediciones 29, 2004) ISBN 8471755327
• Mística Islâmica: convergência com a espiritualidade cristã (Petrópolis: Vozes, 2001) ISBN 8532623573

Contributions and prefaces

• Remembering in a World of Forgetting (by William Stoddart. World Wisdom, 2008) ISBN 9781933316468
• Para Compreender o Islã (by Frithjof Schuon. Rio de Janeiro, 2006) ISBN 8577010465
• Dossier H - Frithjof Schuon (by P. Laude e J-B Aymard. Lausanne, 2002)
• Sophia Perennis (by J-M Prats and Esteve Serra. Palma de Mallorca, 2004)
• O Estudo das Religiões; desafios contemporâneos (by Silas Guerriero. São Paulo, 2003)
• O Homem no Universo (by Frithjof Schuon. São Paulo, 2001)
• O Sentido das Raças (by Frithjof Schuon. São Paulo, 2002)
• O Budismo ao seu alcance (by William Stoddart. Rio de Janeiro, 2004)
• Sabedoria Tradicional & Superstições Modernas" (by Martin Lings. São Paulo, 1998)
• Ensaios sobre a Destruição da Tradição Cristã (by Rama P. Coomaraswamy. São Paulo, 1990)

Articles

• Frithjof Schuon and Sri Ramana Maharshi: A survey of the spiritual masters of the 20th century
• Biography of William Stoddart
• Islã Cristianizado (Portuguese)
• Judaísmo, Anti-Semitismo, Sionismo (Portuguese)
• Opus Dei (Portuguese)

See also

Biography portal

• Perennial Philosophy
• Traditionalist School
• Traditional Catholicism
• Sufism
• Frithjof Schuon
• René Guénon
• Titus Burckhardt
• Ananda Coomaraswamy
• Martin Lings
• Tage Lindbom
• William Stoddart
• Rama Coomaraswamy
• Angus Macnab
• Bernard Philip Kelly
• Whitall Perry
• Harry Oldmeadow
• Patrick Laude

References

1. ^ Published in São Paulo, Brazil, by Ibrasa, 2011.
2. ^ "Iniciación al Islam y al Sufism", Barcelona, 2004.
3. ^ Ye Shall Know The Truth: Christianity and The Perennial Philosophy catalog information at the publisher's website.
4. ^ Remembering in a World of Forgetting: Thoughts on Tradition and Postmodernism at the publisher's website.
5. ^ Excerpts available at Leia trechos de 2 lançamentos da Nova Era (in Portuguese), Folha de São Paulo.

External links

• Soares de Azevedo, Mateus at World Wisdom: short biography and photo.
• Soares de Azevedo, Mateus at Brazilian publisher Sapientia: biography and photo.

Persondata
Name	Azevedo, Mateus Soares de
Alternative names
Short description	Brazilian historian of religions and journalist
Date of birth	1959
Place of birth	Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais
Date of death
Place of death