À roda da eternidade: o elogio da morte e outros discursos sobre finitude na oratória de Antônio Vieira

Abstract

This thesis focus itself in the examination of the sermoning of Antonio Vieira, considering it as a textual portrait on the topic of death, a sort of discursive matrix of Luso-Brazilian parenetics, immersed in the Catholics pastoral and, therefore, founded in both fear and guilty, widely spread in the Tridentine context of Colonial Brazil and Europe. Specifically here, we intend to analyze how researchers could consider the topic of ars moriendi reconfigurately as the epicenter of Vieira's oratory, whose purpose would be to conduct the believer to the 'good death'. Against the idea of the 'eulogy' ingeniously applied in the text of Erasmus of Rotterdam about madness – as a revelation of the importance of ars moriendi. It also shows itself a praise of this topos, namely a commonplace; regarding the work of Vieira, it would suggest an opening to a multifaceted oratory adjusted to the theological and political interests of this time, although it founded itself in the monumental repertoire of traditions. Our purpose will fix in the configurator scenes of the discourse on memento mori into Vieira's work - scenes of preaching at the court, directed to Indians and Africans enslaved. Moreover, it showed how those sermons assimilate and refresh a discursive funereal tradition, a death didactics constituted by rhetoric, poetic and ethic precepts that date back to the Greco-Roman pagan tradition and to both Patristic and Scholastic dogmatic theories. The sermons had shown, theorized and recovered those theories in the philosophical and theological thoughts of the historic Seventeenth Century. Alongside this, without giving up of converging the flow of the questions, this thesis will comment, finally, the difference - considering the sermons when the Portuguese priest to and about their diverse audiences (literates, settlers, Indians, Africans) - adapted to the circumstantial decorum, in the tone of discourse. This process happens modulating words to Word, the intention to the mission, the means to the purpose, in order to product, in our point of view, an adjusted sermon about the death where it is predominant the adequate principle to each audience through a prospected contact about the concepts of truth, life and death, at that time. A well-known preacher at his time, Vieira as focus, we defend, he defended the death adjusted to the political and theological causalities, conceding, reprehending and convincing all those believers, according to decorum. The adequacy specific demanded in the speech maintained stable the natural inequality in the asymmetrical relations, which constituted the Portuguese Old Regime