Historia do Futuro (Livro Anteprimeiro) (review)

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 343 Ant6nio Vieira. Historia do Futuro (Livro .4nteprimeiro). Critical edition with commentary by Jos6 van den Besselaar. Portugiesische Forschungen der G6rresgesellschaft, series 3, vol. 3, pts. I & 2. Mtinster: Verlag Aschendorff, 1976. 2 vols. Pp. xl + 282, iv + 264. DM, 178. Antonio Vieira, S.J. (1608-97) was perhaps the major figure in the Portuguese Restoration of 1640. Through his influence protection was given to merchants of Jewish descent whose goods were otherwise liable to Inquisitorial confiscation. Commerce was the backbone of the reign of John IV, the first king of modern Portugal. The Jesuit's motives grew out of a theory of history that attracted learned attention in his time. The preliminary part of his unfinished work, called historia do Futuro, is its most comprehensive statement. This work has been purged of all the abridgments and corruptions of earlier editions and has also been given an exhaustive learned commentary by Professor Besselaar, one of Europe's most distinguished interpreters of Portuguese culture. Vieira's Historia is about things in apocalyptic literature, both canonical and noncanonical. Of the latter the verses of the sixteenth-century cobblerprophet Bandarra are most notable. There is a whole genre of Portuguese literature about the supposed return of King Sebastian, whose death in battle was fatal to Portuguese sovereignty. In 1580, Philip II of Spain became king in Portugal. According to Vieira, both canonical Scripture and Bandarrist apocalyptic received historical fulfillment in 1640 when the Portuguese people overthrew the Hapsburgs in Europe's first bourgeois revolt. The philosophical assumption here is that when one understands history it is because the institutions of speech are, in apocalyptic at least, causally related to things. The nexus of thought and things is not necessary but contingent, since apocalyptic applies to things in the Portuguese liberating themselves from Spain. Indeed, any causal nexus of thought and things must be contingent upon thought and speech being related in a causal way. The absolute cause of things cannot be a necessary cause, allowing for the freedom of man in the light of his knowledge of things. In Christian thought, God causes intellectual beings by first causing them to know and so acts contingently with respect to their acts. The claim in the Historia that seems to underlay its elaborate arguments from Scripture is novel, I believe. It is that there is an element in the history of the Portuguese Restoration that is a principle of understanding a universal relation in things. Thus Vieira seems to be attempting to break new ground in giving an explanation of the traditional belief that such a relation exists, only in historical terms. Understanding the likeness between things of thought and sense is distinctive of wisdom in Christian thought. Descartes attempted it in the Meditations. But Vieira's methodology is very different. Vieira considers the three estates of the restored Portuguese commonwealth in terms of the traditional three elements of salt, viz., air, fire, and water, wherewith the fourth, earth, is preserved from corruption.' Fused into one, the Portuguese church, nobility, and people fulfill the Scriptural dictum "You are the salt of the earth." Crucially, the meaning of the bonding of elements is not in the ordinary language of physics but in that of apocalyptic. Speech about water in the context of apocalyptic is speech about things observed by sense; not just in the imagination of the seer, but also by the eyes of those who see the things spoken of by the seer as history. Such are the eyes of the common people of apocalyptic times, whose awareness of their contingent position in history is evident in the latter-day sovereignty they enjoy in that universal kingdom revealed in messianic prophecy. Such was the kingdom of modern Portugal in Vieira's eyes. ' Obras Escolhidas, 12 vols. (Lisbon: Sa da Costa, 1951-54), t0:208. 344 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY Vieira saw this sort of self-awareness marking the impending end of the historical mission of the Church. John IV was the "hidden king" of Bandarrist prophecy. The Iberian people were temporal vicars of Christ in recognition of which the popes had given the Portuguese a universal mission? The refinement of the Portuguese idiom Vieira undertook...