Father António Vieira, the theologian

Abstract

Vieira's deep roots in his time did not prevent him from being open to dialogue with different categories of people and attentive to everything that could help him to understand the events of his time. For this seventeenth-century Jesuit, thinking about human life implies much more than a contextual analysis of politics, economics, and social life. For António Vieira, the Word of God is the hermeneutical key of this reflection. It denounces deviations, clarifies, adjusts, purifies and directs the look at the essential of the human being and his destiny. To try to follow him in the itinerary that he proposes will require of us, perhaps, to return some questions, because for him the interrogations formulated by the faith can be done to any person and to any dominion. This does not happen without continual confrontation or without problem, since he "spoke to an audience for which the nobleman was ontologically noble, the clergy, clergy in aeternum, the villain, villain, the Christian, the Christian, the Jew, Jew".