Mateus Soares de Azevedo is post-graduated in international relations by the George Washington University and holds a Masters degree in History of religions from the University of São Paulo, with a thesis on the current importance of the Perennial philosophy.
He is the author of six books on the mystical and esoteric dimensions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism, 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 is Men of a single book: fundamentalism in Islam, Christianity, and modern thought" (Rio de Janeiro, 2008), a critique both of religious and anti-religious fundamentalism; the later represented specially by polemicists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Men of a Single Book is scheduled to be published in 2010 in the United States.
Soares de Azevedo lived in London, England, in the 1980s, where he experienced for the first time the work of the 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 DC, USA, 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.
Soares de Azevedo absorbed elements both from Guénon and Schuon in his later works such as A Inteligência da Fé and Iniciación al Islam y al Sufism.
Mateus 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, featuring works by Frithjof Schuon, René Guénon, Titus Burckhardt and other perennialists. The other is a collection of the most important essays by the British perennialist author William Stoddart.
