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