Antoine Faivre
French academic (1934–2021)
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Until his retirement, he held a chair in the École Pratique des Hautes Études at the Sorbonne, University Professor of Germanic studies at the University of Haute-Normandie, director of the Cahiers del Hermétisme and of Bibliothèque de l'hermétisme.
Early life
Faivre was born in Reims in 1934. His father, a tax officer, was active in the French Resistance to Nazi occupation, for which he was imprisoned at one point. Faivre was raised as a Roman Catholic. He studied literature at the Lycée Louis le Grand for a year before moving on to study German and English literature at the Sorbonne. He served in the French military in Algeria (during the Algerian War) from 1959 to 1962. During his military service he had a mystical experience that led him to return to Catholicism, which he had moved away from during his adolescence.
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Thought
Antoine Faivre believed that occultism, gnosticism and hermeticism share a set of common characteristics that include the faith in the existence of secret and syncretistic correspondences – both symbolic and real – between the "macrocosm and the microcosm, the seen and the unseen, and indeed all that is". Those doctrines believe in alchemic transmutation and on an initiatic transmission of knowledge from a master to his pupil.
According to Hanegraaff, Faivre's criteria for what constitutes Western esotericism can be seen as essentially describing an "enchanted" worldview, as compared to Max Weber's notion of "disenchantment". Hanegraaff also traces Faivre's notion of "correspondences" back to the Neoplatonic concept of sympatheia.
In terms of his personal religious beliefs, Faivre quietly identified as a Catholic throughout his adult life, though he was cautious of established religious institutions and claims of doctrinal exclusivism. Faivre was also a Freemason--he was initiated in the Grande Loge Nationale Française-Opéra in 1969.
Death
Faivre died of cancer on 19 December 2021, at the age of 87.