The Baroque and Padre António Vieira

The Portuguese seventeenth century — the Seiscentismo — is the age of the Baroque: an aesthetic of tension, contrast and ordered excess, born of the religious unease of the Counter-Reformation and cultivated in the academies, pulpits and courts of Iberia. It was above all in prose, and in sacred oratory in particular, that the Portuguese language then found its greatest craftsman: Padre António Vieira (1608–1697), Jesuit, missionary, diplomat and preacher, in whose work Portuguese proves capable of an intellectual architecture of rare density.

The Baroque and the language

Politically, the Seiscentismo opens under the Iberian Union (1580–1640) and closes after the Restoration (1640), in a climate of crisis and national reassertion. In literature, the epic and lyric poetry of the Renaissance — whose summit had been Camões’s Os Lusíadas — yields the foreground to the sermon, the letter and the treatise. The Baroque sentence lengthens into broad periods, rich in subordination, parallelism and antithesis; thought advances by conceits, that is, by ingenious and unexpected associations between distant ideas.

Conceptismo and cultismo

Critics commonly distinguish two currents of the Iberian Baroque style:

• Cultismo (also gongorismo, culteranismo), following the Spaniard Luis de Góngora, seeks ornament: Latinate vocabulary, bold hyperbaton, dense metaphor and mythological allusion. Its weight falls on form and sound.
• Conceptismo, associated with Quevedo and theorised by Baltasar Gracián in Agudeza y arte de ingenio (1648), rests on the conceit — the agudeza, the surprising reasoning that uncovers hidden relations between things. Its weight falls on the idea.

Vieira is the great master of conceptismo in Portuguese. His prose does not seek the gratuitous glitter of the rare word, but the luminous clarity of a demonstration: he argues as one who builds, linking paradoxes and antitheses in the service of a thesis.

António Vieira, the preacher

Born in Lisbon in 1608, Vieira went as a child to Bahia, in Brazil, where he entered the Society of Jesus. He became a missionary in Maranhão and Grão-Pará, a stubborn defender of the indigenous peoples against enslavement by the colonists. Court preacher to King João IV after the Restoration, he was also a diplomat in the crown’s service and an advocate for the cause of the New Christians (cristãos-novos), which earned him a trial before the Inquisition (1663–1667). He later lived in Rome, returning at last to Brazil, where he died in Bahia in 1697.

The art of the sermon

More than two hundred of Vieira’s sermons survive; he himself began to gather and publish them from 1679, in fifteen volumes. Two became exemplary. The Sermão da Sexagésima (preached in Lisbon, in the Royal Chapel, in 1655) is a metalinguistic piece: taking the parable of the sower, Vieira asks why the preaching of his time bears no fruit — and answers that the fault lies in the style, affected and obscure, of the cultist preachers. Against them he defends a word that is clear and piercing.

The Sermão de Santo António aos Peixes (preached in São Luís do Maranhão in 1654, on the eve of his departure for court) is a satirical allegory: since men make no use of the word of God, Vieira preaches to the fish — first praising their virtues and then censuring their vices, in a transparent mirror of human vices and of colonial injustice.

Vieira’s language

Vieira’s power lies in the engineering of the sentence. The period unfolds in long subordination, yet each member answers another in calculated symmetry; the argument advances through oppositions that resolve into a synthesis. His most characteristic devices:

Device	Definition	Effect on the prose
Antithesis	Confrontation of opposing ideas	Creates the binary rhythm of the reasoning
Paradox	An apparently contradictory statement	Provokes wonder and forces reflection
Conceit (agudeza)	An ingenious link between distant things	Sustains the thesis by analogy
Parallelism	Repetition of structures	Lends order and memorability to the period
Gradation	A scaling of terms	Leads the listener to a climax

For all its complexity, Vieira writes to be heard: his syntax, however branching, keeps the transparency he demanded of others. It is this alliance of wit and clarity that makes him a model of prose.

Legacy

Vieira’s prose set a level to which the Portuguese language has rarely returned. Fernando Pessoa called him the “Emperor of the Portuguese Language” — recognising in him not an ornamenter but someone who bent the idiom to the exact measure of thought. After the Baroque, taste would change: the eighteenth-century Neoclassicism and, later, the Romanticism of Garrett and Herculano would react against seventeenth-century wit. But the architecture of Vieira’s sentence remains one of the greatest proofs of what Portuguese can do.