António Vieira and the decadence of Portugal
Portugal is experiencing an economic, social, cultural and clear period decadence that can be similar to other similar periods throughout our history. After the most successful period of the golden age, which had its apo with D. João II, followed by a long decadence during the 17th century. The expulsion of the persecuted, the generalized persecution, the obscure acquisition, the best known.
It was during this time of decadence and Spanish rule that António Vieira was born in Lisbon on February 6, 1612, who, according to Fernando Pessoa, became the emperor of the Portuguese language. António Vieira lamented as few others throughout his life the Portuguese decadence he fought against, until the 18th of July 1697 when he died alone and bitter in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil.
Through ideas, writing, oratory and example, not a moment of his life passed without the mark of his nonconformity with the smallness of the men who ruled Portugal not being registered. António Vieira was everything, a Jesuit priest, a cultivator of the Portuguese language that he raised to unsurpassed levels, a diplomat, adviser to kings and popes, visionary, orator, defender of the Indians whose natural languages spoke.
In that time of evolution of Portugal, in everything similar, today there are changes, in António’s creation, the science and technologies of his time dreamed of and the coming of progress for the modernization of the economy, creation of maritime companies similar to the similar Dutch ones created in large part by those expelled from Portugal. Indeed, he wrote in Brazil in a letter to King D. IV: “At the end of João’s letter that VM made me send VM to say my opinion on the distance of having in this state either two itães-mores or a single governor”.
“I, Lord, reasons never quite known, and today I know them less; but to obey, I will say roughly what I think.
“I say that one thief is less evil than two; and that two good men will be more difficult than one. Two Roman citizens being proposed to Cato for the provision of two places, they replied that both were dissatisfied, one because he had nothing, the other because it was enough. Such are the two captains in which this government was divided: Baltazar de Sousa has nothing, Inácio do Rego nothing is enough for him; and I don’t know what the greatest temptation is, if need be coveted.”
António Vieira had no language to defend what he believed in because, as today, courtiers were many and few defenders of progress in Portugal at the time. In a letter written from Rome on 31-VII-1674 to D.
Duarte Ribeiro de Macedo said: “I say to you that I should be very ashamed of having traitors in our land, but I am more ashamed of so many ignorant people. One day I saw this third paper written by a Secretary of State for the Courts, given and accepted in our palace, full of so many indignities and childhood that I fell like faces to the ground.” Not very different, we say, from the childishness that we witness today to ministers and secretaries of state.
António Vieira was a great defender of progress and economic freedom and he never stopped, or that many rulers do today, according to our conditions for progress, when I wrote in a letter of progress to D. Rodrigo de Menezes:
“I suppose that knowing and suffering with so much discredit the need for the four feet of land that God has given us in Europe, because we do not have to rely on our situation, our ports, our seas and our trades, in which God has improved us and benefited the nations of the world?” This is where we are today, with the preference for the internal market, with the fear of external competition from the foreign railroad and with a first that justifies the Portuguese backwardness with the proximity of other peoples to the center of Europe.
António Vieira was a defender of the Jews and New Christians in Portugal and of the Indians in Brazil, having just joined” the Coimbra Inquisition on October 1, 65 so that, according to private cars, forever with active and passive voice and of the power to preach, and a prisoner in the college or house of his religion which the Holy Office orders him, and from which, without his order, he will not leave”. Vieira was worthy of the protection of the Pope of Rome to get out of prison, restarting his fight for freedom and for the Portugal he imagined. That’s what he did, through the word, until he died.
He wrote about the misfortunes he saw in the governance of the kingdom: “May God help us to wake up from the lethargy in which he comforts”. Or further on: “Of the victories of France, and the desperation to which the Dutch can, I make the same consideration as yours; but our carelessness is of no avail. It feels like we’re into this world. I say to you, I want myself somewhere, if there is so remote, where the name of Portugal is not heard or known. I tremble at the post office that comes from there, because they all come after the reason for pain and without this government we read a new one of taste or hope”.
Recently, resurrected heralds of modern minorities vandalized a statue of António Vieira in Lisbon, which Vieira commented in some anticipation: “For if it was resurrected in the Gospel that, by curing Christ of all kinds of infirmities while being dead, no madman was healed.” Perhaps others can make most of the mistakes publicized as sermons when the Indians say that: ”Many have a lot of nature, but for lack of culture that nature is very rude. If the Portuguese have less greed, and therefore less Indians, they will have more understanding.”
Or did these people write no, these people do not have vices, nor the embarrassments of conscience, with which men of conscience live on the side, because in them you neither have nor envy, nor have the greatest, Nor covetousness, nor ambition, greater nor restitution, nor demands, nor inheritances, nor testaments, we have as moral certainty that every Indian who dies with the sacraments is saved, and this is how the quietness and tranquility, and the piety with which we see him, show.”
Or when: “They are all black, but only in this accident do they distinguish themselves from the Europeans. They have great judgment and skill, and all the politics that fits in people without faith and without much wealth, which is what nature teaches.”
“There are clerics and canons here as black as jet, but so composed, so authoritative, so learned, so great musicians, so discreet and well-bred, that they can make the envy of those we see there in our cathedrals.”
Father António Vieira was a shining star in the black sky of Portuguese decadence. Today I eat a lot and according to him: “little of this or little sense must have those who take part in the present government, and I only apologize for not having seen more of the world than from Lisbon to Belém.” Or again: “Portugal sir, you are in the most miserable state in which I have never known or considered you, and the greatest misery is deceit and the greatest war is our misunderstood peace”.