Patrick Laude

Patrick Laude was born in France in 1958. He took an undergraduate degree in History and a graduate degree in Philosophy at the University of Paris-Sorbonne while a Fellow at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He came to the US in the early 1980s and obtained a Ph.D. in French literature from Indiana University, with a Minor in Philosophy, in 1985

He has taught classes and done research in French language and literature, mystical literature and poetry, comparative religion (including Christianity, Islam, and Sufism), and on the connections between cultures and religions. Dr. Laude currently is a professor at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar

He is the author of numerous articles and several books dealing with the relationship between mysticism, symbolism and literature, as well as important spiritual figures such as Jeanne Guyon, Simone Weil, Louis Massignon and Frithjof Schuon. His works include Approches du Quiétisme (Tübingen, 1992), Massignon intérieur (L’Age d’Homme, Paris-Lausanne, 2001), The Way of Poetry (Oneonta Philosophy Studies, New York, 2001). He is also the co-editor of Dossier H Frithjof Schuon (L’Age d’Homme, Paris-Lausanne, 2001), and the co-author –with Jean-Baptiste Aymard—of Frithjof Schuon. Life and Teachings (SUNY Press, 2004). He is currently Professor of French at Georgetown University.

Dr. Patrick Laude has extended his work on the writings of Frithjof Schuon by editing several new editions of Schuon’s books, including extensive editor’s notes at the back of the book that illuminate many of the references and quotations found throughout Schuon’s text. The first of these new editions edited by Laude is Understanding Islam: A New Translation with Selected Letters. More recently, Dr. Laude finished From the Divine to the Human: A New Translation with Selected Letters. For both of these books Patrick Laude contributed the Editor’s Notes and an Editor’s Preface.

Patrick Laude is the author of a unique book on the conjunction between mystical poetry and univeral spiritual experience, Singing the Way: Insights in Poetry and Spiritual Transformation (2005). He is co-editor of an anthology of spiritual poetry entitled, Music of the Sky (2004). Dr. Laude has also edited a volume of writings across many religious traditions on what has been called the “prayer of the Heart” or “centering prayer,” Pray without Ceasing: An Anthology of the Way of the Invocation in World Religions.

Besides the books mentioned above that he wrote or edited, Patrick Laude has also contributed a number of essays to other World Wisdom books: His essay “Quintessential Esoterism and the Wisdom of Forms: Reflections on Frithjof Schuon’s Intellectual and Spiritual Legacy” appeared in Sacred Web 20, a volume dedicated to the life and work of Frithjof Schuon on his birth centenary. Laude also wrote the “Introduction” to Returning to the Essential: The Selected Writings of Jean Biès, and the “Foreword” to Roots of the Human Condition by Frithjof Schuon. Other essays that he has contributed to World Wisdom books include “One for All, All for One: The Individual and the Community in Traditional and Modern Contexts” in The Betrayal of Tradition,”Holy Fools” in Every Branch in Me, as well as “On the Foundations and Norms of Poetry” in The Essential Sophia. Click here to read Patrick Laude’s essay ‘On the Foundations and Norms of Poetry’ in its entirety in pdf format from our online Library. Most recently, Dr. Laude wrote the Foreword to  Universal Aspects of the Kabbalah and Judaism by Leo Schaya