António Vieira: the Lisbon-born Jesuit who preached to the fish

On 6 February 1608 a boy was born in Rua dos Cónegos, a street that runs against the walls of Lisbon Cathedral. A few steps away was the place where Saint Anthony of Lisbon had been born more than four centuries earlier, and his biographer Aníbal Pinto de Castro thinks that is why the parents called the child António.2 sources2 sources

Nine days later the baby was baptised in the cathedral. Walking with him was Fernão Teles de Meneses, the future Count of Unhão, whose household the family had served.1 source1 source

The family was not noble, whatever Vieira later claimed. His father, Cristóvão Vieira Ravasco, came from Santarém, and his own father had been a servant of the Unhão household who married, in Castro's words, “a certain mulatta or Indian woman”. His mother, Maria de Azevedo, was the daughter of Brás Fernandes, an armourer of the royal household, and her dowry was a post in the courts or the administration for whoever married her.1 source1 source

Vieira never spoke of that ancestry, but it showed in his face. In 1666 the Inquisition looked into his forebears, and when his father and his brother Gonçalo applied to join the Order of Christ, in 1663 and 1683, they struggled to prove the “purity of blood” it demanded.1 source1 source

Portugal in 1608 had no king of its own. Since 1580 the kings of Spain had also been kings of Portugal, and they would remain so until a coup in Lisbon on 1 December 1640.1 source1 source

The mother's dowry soon paid off. Cristóvão was appointed a clerk of the High Court in Bahia, in Brazil, and sailed in 1609, leaving his wife and son in Lisbon. He came back three years later and stayed until 1614, when he took the whole family across the Atlantic. António was six when he first saw Brazil.1 source1 source

The only school in Bahia was the Jesuits' college. They had taught reading and writing in the city since about 1550, and the college grew out of that first school; Castro dates its foundation to 1590. It taught what the order's schools taught everywhere from Lisbon to Macau: grammar, rhetoric, poetics, history and philosophy.1 source1 source

On 5 May 1623, aged 15, Vieira knocked on the door of the college to begin his novitiate, and the rector, Fernão Cardim, took him in. Older biographers say he ran away from home at night to do it. Castro doubts it: his father was a practical man, and a son in the Jesuits opened doors.1 source1 source

As a novice he was sent to the Jesuit mission of Espírito Santo, seven leagues from the city. There he learned Tupi, an Indigenous language, and met the people he would spend much of his life arguing about. He took his first vows on 6 May 1625.1 source1 source

His superiors soon trusted him with words. He wrote the province's annual report to Rome for 1624 and 1625, which had to describe the Dutch capture of Bahia in 1624, and from about 1627 taught rhetoric at Olinda. He was ordained priest in the cathedral of Bahia on 10 December 1634.2 sources2 sources

He was already preaching. His first official sermon was on the fourth Sunday of Lent 1633, in Bahia's church of the Conceição. On 27 December that year he preached to the Black brotherhood of a sugar mill, enslaved Africans devoted to Our Lady of the Rosary, a sermon later printed as the fourteenth of his Rosary sermons.2 sources2 sources

War gave him a bigger stage. In 1638 Dutch forces under Maurits of Nassau began a siege that lasted forty days. In May or June 1640, in Bahia, Vieira preached for the success of Portugal's arms against Holland, and held God himself responsible for the sufferings of the war.1 source1 source

When news came that Portugal had a king again, João IV, the viceroy in Bahia sent an envoy to Lisbon to assure him of the colony's loyalty, and Vieira went too, in 1641. On 1 January 1642 he preached in the Royal Chapel, and the king made him his preacher and confidant.3 sources3 sources

João IV used him as a diplomat. In 1646, 1647 and 1650 Vieira went on missions to The Hague, Paris and Rome, refusing the title of ambassador. Much of the business was peace with the Dutch, who still held Pernambuco in Brazil.3 sources3 sources

His letters from those years are blunt about what Brazil ran on. Arguing against handing Angola to the Dutch, he wrote: “Without Blacks there is no Pernambuco, and without Angola there are no Blacks.” In another letter he suggested that if Pernambuco had to be given up, the enslaved Africans and the sugar mills should be taken out first.1 source1 source

Vieira's answer to an empty treasury was New Christian money. In a proposal of July 1643 he told the king that if he favoured these merchants and invited the exiles back, “Lisbon will be the greatest empire of riches”. In 1646 he asked for an end to the confiscation of their property, and for accusations to be made openly, naming the crime and the accusers.3 sources3 sources

Part of the plan came true in 1649, with the founding of the General Company of Commerce of Brazil, a trading company Vieira had urged as a home for New Christian capital. The same year the Inquisition began collecting denunciations of Vieira. Only the king's protection kept it from acting on them.3 sources3 sources

In 1652 Vieira left the court for the Jesuit mission in Maranhão, on Brazil's northern coast. The settlers there depended on Indigenous labour, and many of their Indian slaves had, in Vieira's view, been taken unjustly.3 sources3 sources

On the first Sunday of Lent 1653, in São Luís, he told the whole town it was going to Hell. Smallpox, famine and the Dutch had all come to Maranhão, he said, because of unjust captivity. Then he offered a deal.2 sources2 sources

The deal was not freedom for all. Indians who agreed to stay could remain with their masters, and captives from a “just war”, or bought from rival peoples who would have killed them, stayed slaves. Indians freed by a board would live in mission villages and work six months a year for settlers, at two lengths of cotton cloth a month.1 source1 source

On 13 June 1654, the feast of Saint Anthony, Vieira preached in São Luís on Christ's words to preachers, “You are the salt of the earth”, and asked why the earth stayed corrupt. Like the saint at Rimini, who preached to the fish when the heretics would not listen, he turned his sermon to the sea.3 sources3 sources

The fish stood for the colonists of Maranhão. When the sermon was printed in Lisbon in 1682, a note explained that he had preached it three days before he “embarked secretly for the kingdom, to seek a remedy for the salvation of the Indians”.2 sources2 sources

In a letter of 1654 he put nineteen measures to João IV. He won the king's support and sailed back in 1655 at the head of the missions of Maranhão and Pará. He demanded that the Jesuits govern the mission villages in temporal as well as spiritual matters, arguing that whoever converted the Indians also needed the power to defend them.3 sources3 sources

João IV died in November 1656. The next year Vieira wrote to the boy king, Afonso VI. The queen mother, Luísa de Gusmão, had lost her eldest son and eldest surviving daughter in 1653, and Vieira hinted that their deaths were God's punishment for laws that allowed Indians to be enslaved, as Pharaoh had lost his first-born for holding the Hebrews captive.2 sources2 sources

The settlers lost patience. They turned on the Jesuits, and in 1661 they shipped Vieira back to Lisbon. Alcir Pécora dates his expulsion to 1662.3 sources3 sources

Vieira's defence of Indigenous freedom did not extend to Africans. Several of his thirty sermons on the Rosary deal with African slavery: João Batista Pereira counts three, the fourteenth, twentieth and twenty-seventh, and Guilherme Amaral Luz adds the sixteenth. None of them asks for it to end. In the fourteenth, preached in 1633 to the sugar-mill brotherhood, he likened the slaves' labour to Christ's suffering.3 sources3 sources

In a sermon to a Black brotherhood he told his listeners to thank God for taking them from their lands, where they had lived as heathens, to this one, where they could live as Christians and be saved. In the fourteenth he promised that the Rosary would turn the mill's inferno into paradise, and that their masters had more reason to envy their sufferings than they had to envy their masters' pleasures.3 sources3 sources

The literary scholar Alcir Pécora warns against reading Vieira as an abolitionist. For Vieira, captivity, of Indians or of Africans, was unjust but less of an evil than ignorance of Christ, and the master's duty was to teach his slaves the faith, not free them. “Keep them, Christians, and keep many,” he told the slave owners of São Luís in 1657, “but keep them in such a way that they help carry your soul to heaven, and you theirs.”1 source1 source

His letters were more practical than his sermons. In 1691 he argued against sending Jesuits to the quilombo, or runaway-slave community, of Palmares: its people would settle for nothing less than complete freedom, and that, he wrote, “would be the total destruction of Brazil”.2 sources2 sources

Historians still argue over how to read this. Guilherme Amaral Luz writes that Brazilian historiography is “very rich in misunderstandings” about the Jesuits and slavery. He and Pécora read the sermons as the work of a seventeenth-century theologian, not a modern reformer.2 sources2 sources

Before he left Maranhão, Vieira had written the letter that would ruin him. In April 1659 he sent the queen's confessor, André Fernandes, a text later called Esperanças de Portugal (Hopes of Portugal). Reading the rhyming prophecies of the shoemaker Bandarra, which also fed the cult of the lost King Sebastião, he argued that João IV would rise from the dead.2 sources2 sources

That resurrection belonged to what Vieira called the Fifth Empire. After the empires foretold in the Book of Daniel, the last of them Rome, would come a new age, spiritual under the Pope and temporal under a Portuguese king. The Turk would be defeated, the lost tribes of Israel would reappear and be converted, and people would live long lives in peace.3 sources3 sources

The Inquisition got hold of the private letter and sent it to Rome, where nine of its propositions were censured. Politics did the rest. In 1662 Afonso VI took power and handed the government to the Count of Castelo Melhor, an enemy of the queen mother's circle, and Vieira was sent to Porto and then to Coimbra.1 source1 source

He first appeared before the Coimbra tribunal on 21 July 1663. For two years he argued as a theologian: João IV's resurrection was probable, not certain, and an error made without bad intent was no crime. Pleading illness, he asked for more time; he was coughing up blood. On 1 October 1665, after an angry petition to the Inquisition's council, he was locked in its cells.2 sources2 sources

In prison the questions turned to Judaism. His inquisitors accused him of using the Fifth Empire as a cover for the Jewish hope of a Messiah, and of his old plan to bring the Jews back to Portugal. At the start of almost every session, the notary wrote the same line: he “said he had no faults to confess”.1 source1 source

On 18 October 1667 the tribunal itself agreed that nothing in the case legally proved him guilty of heresy or Judaism. It condemned him anyway. On 23 December the sentence was read to him in Coimbra over two and a quarter hours: he lost forever the right to preach and any voice in his order, and was confined to a Jesuit house.2 sources2 sources

By then the government had fallen. In November 1667 Afonso VI's younger brother Pedro took power as regent, and Vieira's friends returned to court. In June 1668 the Inquisition pardoned him, leaving in force only his promise not to discuss the propositions again.2 sources2 sources

Vieira left for Rome in August 1669 and stayed six years. His preaching won over the cardinals and Queen Christina of Sweden, who asked him in vain to become her spiritual director, and he pleaded the cause of Portugal's New Christians. In 1675 a papal brief removed him for good from the Portuguese inquisitors' jurisdiction, leaving him answerable only to the Roman one, and lifted any censures against him.4 sources4 sources

He returned to Lisbon in 1675. In 1679 the first volume of his sermons was printed in Lisbon, and in 1681 he sailed for Bahia, this time for good.3 sources3 sources

His last years were not quiet. From 1688 to 1691 he was visitor, or inspector, of the Jesuit province of Brazil, and he was accused of conniving in the murder of a colonial official. Mostly he worked on his sermons and on the Clavis Prophetarum (Key of the Prophets), the Latin work on Christ's kingdom on earth that he had begun in 1649.4 sources4 sources

On 13 July 1697 he dictated a letter to the head of the Jesuits in Rome. He had lost “almost all the faculty of seeing and hearing”, he said, but half-dead as he was, he had finished dictating the twelfth volume of his sermons, and with the help of his secretary, the Jesuit António Maria Bonucci, he hoped to finish the Clavis within a year.1 source1 source

He died at dawn on 18 July 1697, in the city of Bahia, after three days of high fever. He was 89. The twelfth volume of sermons reached Lisbon on the same ship as the news of his death. The unfinished Clavis was locked in a chest with two keys, one for the Jesuit provincial of Brazil and one for the rector of the Bahia college.2 sources2 sources

Portuguese teenagers meet Vieira at school. The Sermon of Saint Anthony is set for the eleventh year of secondary school, and the Ministry of Education's study guides walk pupils through his life, the fish and their faults. The same guides repeat the phrase Fernando Pessoa gave him in the twentieth century: “the emperor of the Portuguese language”.2 sources2 sources

His trial file, catalogued as case 1664 of the Lisbon Inquisition, is in the Torre do Tombo, Portugal's national archive, with autograph letters and copies of the sentence. Another copy of the sentence is in the Ets Haim library in Amsterdam, the city where many Portuguese Jewish exiles had settled.3 sources3 sources

His writings are now in print as a whole, in a complete edition edited by José Eduardo Franco and Pedro Calafate, and the trial records were published in São Paulo in 1995. They show a man who argued for the freedom of Indigenous people and for tolerance of New Christians, and for keeping the Angolan slave trade.3 sources3 sources