Called "Emperor of the Portuguese Language" by Fernando Pessoa, Father Antônio Vieira he was the author of correspondences, prophetic texts and sermons. This last textual genre guaranteed him great prominence for the wealth in language work and by the approach of political and social themes amidst religious images.
Controversial, Vieira was a Jesuit, contrary to the excesses of Inquisition and was very successful as preacher. His impeccable linguistic skills, particularly in rhetoric and oratory, made him the official preacher at the Portuguese court for a period. And his unconventional ideas even landed him in prison for heresy.
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Biography
Antonio Vieira born in Lisbon, in February 6, 1608. His father, Cristóvão Vieira, was an official in the Portuguese crown and was directed to Salvador to act as a scribe in 1615. Thus, Vieira moved with his family to Brazil, then a Portuguese colony, where he began his studies at the Jesuit College.
In 1623, joined the Society of Jesus, where he stood out for the good use of rhetoric and oratory, also teaching them to the novices of Olinda. Ordained a priest in 1634, he began his career as a preacher in the Bahian villages.
Upon learning of the Portuguese Restoration (1640), movement that ended the Iberian Union and ensured Portugal's resumption of political autonomy, Vieira returned to Lisbon to reinforce his support for the crown. He then became a preacher at the Chapel Royal, a trusted man of King D. João IV and received several diplomatic missions. He was also involved in some court intrigues, such as the defense of the new christians before the Inquisition, which had expelled them from Portugal.
He returned to Brazil in 1652 and began to devote himself to preaching and catechesis in Maranhão. Versed in seven indigenous languages, he approached these communities, defending the end of enslavement of native peoples and also of Africans. He soon suffered retaliation: the planters and slave owners were very upset with Vieira's ideals and expelled him from Maranhão in 1661.
Vieira then returned to Lisbon, where his horizon of religious freedom also troubled the Inquisition. Accused of approaching Jews, the priest was taken as a heretic and arrested by the Inquisitors in 1666. Amnesty the following year, he left for Rome, where he distinguished himself as a preacher and denounced abuses by the Portuguese Inquisition.
In 1681, he returned to Salvador and began to review and organize the most two hundred sermons that make up his work, exercising high positions in the Jesuit bureaucracy. He died at Colégio da Bahia, aged 89, in July 18, 1697.
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literary features
→ the form of the sermon
Since the years of the priesthood, Vieira has stood out as great speaker. The vast majority of his texts were written, therefore, in the sermon format, that is, prose texts of moral and religious orientation which aim to argue and persuade the reader.
→ Religious, social and political engagement
Vieira's sermons were not only religiously oriented, but reflected his participation in the social and political debates of the time. Themes such as the Portuguese Restoration, the Dutch invasions in Pernambuco, the enslavement of indigenous and black people and the defense of New Christians before the Inquisition are very present in his work. There is also a utopian horizon in his texts, born of ideals counter-reformers of the triumph of the Catholic Church on Earth.
→ high verbal expression
Vieira's prose is a consolidation of literary standards that Camões had proposed in Portuguese, composing his texts with vocabulary wealth, syntactic structures that oscillate between simpler and more complex, in addition to ability to polish the speech in a precise and ingenious way.
→ Exponent of baroque
Vieira can be considered an exponent of baroque movement prose in Portuguese. His sermons are written in an imagery, making use of metaphors, synonyms, hyperbole, apostrophes and language games. Vieira's prose mainly reverberates characteristics of conceptism, that is, the care with language in order to exemplify a logical argument, making use of syllogisms and dialectics.
Read too: Baroque – period style with strong religious influence
Construction
The work of Padre Antônio Vieira is traditionally divided into prophetic texts, sermons and correspondences. the calls prophetic texts appear in lesser quantity – among them, the works hopes of Portugal and history of the future. In these texts, Vieira imagines a spiritual destiny to which the portuguese kingdom would be predestined: the construction of the Fifth Empire of Christ on Earth, a kind of universal Christian monarchy that would rule a long period of peace among all peoples, before the arrival of the Last Judgment. This Lusocentrism reverberates in the Portuguese people a new hope, after forty years of unification of Portugal and Spain.
![Statue in Lisbon representing Father Antônio Vieira surrounded by indigenous children. [1]](/f/669397cc576f13d360e070b71e78cc14.jpg)
At cards represent a huge portion of Vieira's work: there are more than seven hundred correspondences exchanged with monarchs, nobles, members of the Tribunal of the Holy Office and other members of the Church, especially Jesuits. This epistolary compilation gives samples not only of the priest's great literary articulation, but also of important historical and political issues of his time.
→ Sermons
The more than two hundred sermons are responsible for making Father Antônio Vieira's work famous. Since the novitiate, the author has distinguished himself by rhetoric and oratory skills and he was an excellent preacher in Brazil and Portugal. It said that "preaching is like sowing" and it was for sermon form that the priest found a way to spread your political and religious thoughts in hard-worked language, well finished and richly argumentative, reverberating in readers and listeners the great power of the Catholic Church and the Portuguese kingdom.
They are examples of evangelization, of the great utopia of a universal Catholicism, which for Vieira involved the need for major administrative reforms in the Brazilian colony, mixing spiritual and material matters, such as the sugar economy and the slavery mode of production. Bold, the author priest makes use of scathing criticisms of the vices of the colonists and the corruption of the colonial administration.
The structure of the sermons is organized into three parts:
introvery or exordium: is the introduction to the topic, the subject that the sermon will deal with;
development or argument: in this part, the main ideas of the text are developed. This is when the author presents the arguments to convince the public;
peroration: is the conclusion of the sermon. It usually expresses the conclusion of the argument with the author's opinion on the subject.
You most famous sermons of Father Antônot Vieira they are: Sermon of the Sixtieth, Fourteenth Sermon of the Rosary, Sermon for the Good Success of Portugal's Arms against Holland's, Sermon on the First Sunday of Lent and St. Anthony's Sermon to the Pisces.
Read an excerpt from St. Anthony's Sermon to the Pisces:
“You, says Christ, our Lord, speaking with preachers, are the salt of the earth: and call them salt of the earth, because he wants them to do on the earth what salt does. The effect of salt is to prevent corruption; but when the earth is as corrupt as ours is, and there are so many in it who have an office of salt, what will it be, or what can be the cause of this corruption? It's either because the salt doesn't salt, or because the earth doesn't allow itself to be salted. Or is it because salt doesn't salt, and preachers don't preach true doctrine; or because the earth does not allow itself to be salted, and the hearers, being true the doctrine they give them, do not want to receive it. Or is it because salt doesn't salt, and preachers say one thing and do another; or because the earth does not allow itself to be salted, and the listeners want to imitate what they do rather than do what they say. [...]
He preached St. Anthony in Italy in the city of Ariminum, against the heretics, who were many there; and as errors of understanding are difficult to uproot, not only did the saint not bear fruit, but the people came to rise up against him and it took little time for them not to take his life. What would the generous spirit of the great Antônio do in this case? Would he dust off his shoes, as Christ counsels elsewhere? But Antony barefoot could not make this protest; and feet that had not caught anything from the earth did not have to shake. [...] Why did he do it? He only changed the pulpit and the auditorium, but he didn't give up on the doctrine. Leave the squares, go to the beaches; he leaves the land, goes to the sea, and begins to say in loud voices: Since men do not want to listen to me, let the fishes listen to me. Oh wonders of the Most High! Oh powers of what created the sea and the earth! The waves begin to boil, the fish begin to compete, the big ones, the biggest ones, the little ones, and all put in their order with their heads sticking out of the water, Antonio preached and they listened. […]
Anyway, what are we going to preach to the fish today? Never worse auditorium. At least fish have two good qualities of listeners: they hear and they don't speak. Only one thing could disconsolate the Preacher, which is that the fish that will not convert are people. But this pain is so ordinary, that, as a result of custom, it is almost not felt […] Assuming this, so that we proceed with clarity, I will divide, Pisces, your sermon on two points: in the first I will praise you for your attitudes, in the second I will rebuke you for your vices. […]
Vieira starts the sermon introducing a biblical quote: "you are the salt of the earth", that is, it is the faithful, the listeners, who must actively participate in community life and prevent it from becoming a stage for corruption or atrocious deviations from conduct. He then goes on to mention an episode in which St. Anthony went to preach the Gospel to an audience that did not give him attention and, therefore, he decided to preach to the fish: since “the earth cannot be salted”, he directs his word to the sea.
Scallop andwrote this sermon a few days before leaving for Portugal, thanks to the persecution that slave masters had been suffering for their constant criticism of the abuses perpetrated by them. Thus, he retrieves the words of St. Anthony addressed to heretics, non-believers, and applies the saint's speech to his colonial audience. He praises remora, a small fish that allows itself to be transported by larger fish, turtles or even boats. The remora would function, then, as the rudder and bridle of the ship: Santo Antônio and the word of the Gospel would be this little fish that saves men from pride, revenge and greed, sins that Vieira perceived as vivid in colonial society Portuguese.
Quoting Santo Antônio, Vieira points out that the evil that affects the settlers is the fact that men, like fish, devour each other, the biggest always eating the smallest. It is the weak who suffer the evil of the strong. And the denunciation of injustice constant that afflicted those without power, who enslaved others for their own sake. And those same big fish from the colony would be devoured by the even bigger fish from the metropolis.
the dscallop speech it is quite persuasive: through argumentative logic, allegory and well-finished style, making use of metaphors and antitheses, it leads the listener to reasoning – and convincing.
Read too: Baroque in Brazil - the particularities of the occurrence of this movement on Brazilian soil
Sentences
“To speak to the wind, words are enough; to speak in the heart, works are necessary”
“Men, with their evil and perverse greed, become like fish, who eat one another (…) and the big eat the little ones”
"Of an error many are born, and on such a wrong foundation there was never a right building"
“Everything that is done for the eyes of men, even if it is done, it is not done”.
"The reason we don't find rest is because we look where it isn't"
"Humility is essentially the knowledge of one's dependence, one's own imperfection and one's misery"
“We are what we do. What is not done does not exist. So we only exist on the days we do. On the days we don't do it, we just last"
Image credit
[1]Mariangela Cruz / Shutterstock.com
by Luiza Brandino
Literature teacher
