This essay is part of a series of articles that Oswald de Andrade (1890–1954)—Brazilian poet, essayist, and journalist, as well as one of the main proponents of Brazilian modernism of the 1920s—published in the daily O Estado de São Paulo in 1953. De Andrade wrote this text in 1950 as a master’s thesis (submitted to and declined by the Faculdade de Filosofia e Letras, Universidade de São Paulo). “A marcha das utopias” can be read as de Andrade’s ultimate thoughts about the actuality of “utopia” as it is geographically and spiritually related to the Americas. He returned consistently to this idea throughout his long career. The essay has been reprinted extensively, including a posthumous edition by Brazil’s Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC) [(Rio de Janeiro: MEC, Os Cadernos de Cultura, vol. 139, 1966)]. This translation is based on the version included in the definitive compilation of his work, Oswald de Andrade, Obras Completas [vol. 6: Do Pau Brasil à Antropofagia e às Utopias: manifestos, teses de concursos e ensaios (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira/Instituto Nacional do Libro- MEC, 1972), 147–57].
THE CYCLE THAT BEGAN IN THE EARLY YEARS of the sixteenth century with the publication of the letters of [Amerigo] Vespucci and ended in 1848 with the Communist Manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels could be called the Cycle of Utopias. . . .
The high points of the Cycle of Utopias were: in the sixteenth century, the miscegenation brought by the Discoveries; in the seventeenth century, our national struggle against Holland and the Treaty of Westphalia, which settled the Thirty Years War and defeated Austria’s ambitions to absorb Germany, opening the state horizons of German Imperialism for the Reformation; in the eighteenth century, the French Revolution coming to an end, as we have said, in the political earthquake of 1848.
[In the Brazilian case,] the importance of the Dutch War was that it prefigured two opposing conceptions of life–Reformation and Counter-Reformation. . . . I believe the biggest mistake of Catholicism was the act of Clement XIV suppressing the conquering order of [Ignatius of] Loyola. Today, Brazil represents what remains of Jesuit culture, almost a stranger to Romanticism. [This culture] had its most notable expression in the position of Emperor Pedro II during the “Issue of the Bishops.”1
The failure to create a national Church makes me think more about the schismatic incompetence of the rebellious priests than of the historical impossibility of the phenomenon. No sooner does a prophet call himself a shepherd of Christ’s flock than he is surrounded by heteroclites and deluded multitudes. There is the case of “[António] Conselheiro” immortalized by Euclides [da Cunha] in Os Sertões [Rebellion in the Backlands] (1909). There is Padre Cícero [in Ceará], as well as the series of curandeiros [healers] with cassocks, legal or otherwise, prowling the ambulant faith of the Brazilian masses. There is the irrepressible surge of the spiritualist sects and the “linguas-de-fogo” [tongues-of-fire] that overrun and demoralize religious orthodoxy.
Although dismembered into thousands of Pythagorean, Orphic, Satanic, or Christian sects, of which a sketchy image is offered in the beautiful book by Paulo Barreto—As Religiões no Rio [Religions in Rio]—I still believe that, in the modern world, our religious culture will triumph over the gelid Calvinist conception that casts North America as an inhuman land that banishes Charlie [Chaplin] and promotes [Senator Joseph R.] McCarthy. In the Dutch war, we defeated a foreign nation that, under great command and with superior force of arms, wanted to impose a foreign language and a foreign culture on us. The limits of our destiny were foreshadowed [in that war]. Utopias are, thus, a consequence of the discovery of the new man, the distinctive man encountered in the lands of America.
According to accounts, it was from a contact in Flanders with one of the twenty-four men left in the trading post at Cabo Frio [in Rio de Janeiro] by Amerigo Vespucci, that Thomas More [SEE DOCUMENT I.1.2] derived the idea for his Utopia and his enthusiasm for a kind of society diverging from the existent one, a society that would cast off the dead weight of the medieval encumbrances still in force. This sailor [Raphael Hythloday], of Portuguese origin, would have met More in the Cathedral of Antwerp, a port city where the emissary of Henry VIII had been sent in a diplomatic-commercial mission concerning the exportation of English wools. In the opening episode of the book, we learn that More was profoundly interested in that weather-beaten sailor who had set foot in the New World and had met the New Man. They spent the whole day together, and that was when the yearning of the Humanist for this people from whose existence and customs “one could take examples suitable to enlighten our nations” manifested itself. That sea-wolf found Europe rotten to the point of declaring that a wise man would not waste his time in making the voice of reason heard to completely amoral statesmen. The allusion was clearly against the tyrant Henry VIII, whom More served and who later ordered him decapitated, as well as against Cromwell’s father.
More’s Utopia contains a curious criticism of absolutist political measures at a time when the suppression and confiscation of Catholic convents by terrorist Anglicans had eliminated every kind of assistance to the people [in opposition to a practice rooted in] the medieval tradition of charity. Henry VIII, at that moment, was instituting laws against violent robbery: for a second offense, the punishment was to be the loss of an ear, and for the third occurrence, the gallows. These were the times in which “the poor, like wasps, live without conveying a drop of honey, taking advantage of the work of others.” As usual, instead of improving social conditions, the sovereign tried to eliminate its symptoms with iron and fire.
More, who had come under the influence of Erasmus at Oxford University, discovered his social climate in the Praise of Folly, which dared to state that the need for mercenary armies fosters vagrancy. “Thieves are not bad soldiers, nor are soldiers worse than thieves, thus the relationship between the two careers.” More champions a justice that would “destroy crime and preserve men.” He fearlessly attacks the cunning [clergy] who reconcile evangelical doctrine to human passions. [More’s] Christianity reclaims the social revolution in which it originated. “Almost all of Jesus’ teachings condemn today’s customs more strongly than all my criticism.”
Clearly, Henry VIII’s entire life would be illustrative of this accurate observation.
The geography of Utopia is located in America. It is a Portuguese sailor who describes to More the people and the customs discovered on the other side of the Earth. One century later, Campanella, in his Civitas Solis [The City of the Sun], would refer to a Genovese ship owner reminiscent of Christopher Columbus. And even Francis Bacon (possibly Shakespeare), who would write The New Atlantis in the seventeenth century, has his expedition depart from Peru.
With the exception of the Republic of Plato, an invented state, all the Utopias that appeared on the horizon of the modern world twenty centuries later and made a profound impression on it, were engendered by the discovery of America. Brazil did not play a minor role in the social conquests of the Renaissance.
Mr. Osvaldo Aranha [the Brazilian politician who gave the inaugural speech at the United Nations General Assembly] is no fool at all. To the contrary, he has occupied the highest positions in our government with brilliance and efficiency. Just recently, in his investiture speech, Chancellor Vicente Rao noted the fame surrounding [Mr. Aranha’s] name in the United Nations. What interests me about Aranha, more than his career, are some of his statements that I consider first-rate. He said recently to a newspaper: “Brazil will be one of the great leaders by the end of our century and will bring to the new human order material and spiritual contributions unsurpassed by other nations, even by those which are today more advanced.”
This is exactly what I think. My faith in Brazil comes from the social configuration it assumed, molded by the Jesuit civilization in opposition to the austere and mechanical Calvinism that produced North American capitalism. One could counter this with the example of São Paulo, where incalculable progress was produced, the same [progress] that distinguished the Protestant nations from the dilatory path in the same direction followed by the nations that maintained Catholicism. [But] we should not confuse a phase of history with History itself. We have to accept the uncontested superiority of a Calvinism based on inequality as an impetus for technology and progress. But today, having achieved the values produced by mechanization, the time has come to revise [these values] and seek out new horizons.
What is history if not a continuous revision of ideas and directions?
Arriving at the climax of technology, Calvinism–which was, with the doctrine of Grace, the instrument of progress—has to give way to a human and egalitarian conception of life, one that was given to us by the Counter Reformation. . . . To start with, however, it is necessary to acknowledge how broad this conception must be. I designate as its sign and banner the Counter Reformation. Under no circumstances am I assuming a religious or ideological compromise when I praise the Jesuits. Understanding as I do the universal religious feeling which I call Orphic sentiment, which touches and marks all civilized people as well as all primitive groups, this [praise] in no way invalidates my neutrality with regard to all cults and religions. . . .
When I talk about the Counter Reformation, I want to create an immediate and firm opposition to the arid and inhuman concept brought about by the Reformation, which had as its cultural foothold in England, Germany, and the United States of America. On the contrary, we Brazilians—champions of miscegenation of both race and culture—we are the Counter Reformation, even without God or religious ritual. We are the manifestation of Utopia, for better or worse, as opposed to the mercenary and mechanical utilitarianism of the North. We are the caravel that laid anchor in Paradise or the inhospitable jungle; we are the Bandeira2 stuck on the farm. What we need is to identify ourselves and to consolidate our lost psychic, moral, and historical contours.
Karl Kautsky—Lenin’s renegade—wrote one of the most curious treatises about Christianity that I know. The central theme of his study is historical materialism, and he gets it right for the most part in many of his statements and much of his research. A new idea he introduces in his book is that monotheistic religions are born of the desert, where there is no malleable material for the fabrication of idols or fetishes, while the countries rich in copper, iron, marble, etc., regale themselves with an infinite repetition of images which produces polytheism. . . .
What relationship can there be between Kautsky’s assertion and a study about Renaissance Utopias? It is that they are [both] born of the impulse of an exogamic race that affixed its historical destiny on warlike monotheism. . . . On the contrary, the Semitic branch of the Arabs undertook, over millennia, the excursion [that would transport] its fertilizing genes over all routes, open or closed, by land and sea. This would lead, in the enchantment of the Discoveries, to the molding and creation of the Utopian paradises that deflected Europe from its Ptolemaic egocentrism. The Arabs were so tolerant that, in the great Caliphate of Córdoba, the use of half a dozen of languages was allowed, from the classical Arabic of the writers to the ecclesiastic Latin, and the dialect that would later become Castilian. In eight centuries of domination, the language of the conqueror was not imposed. . . .
In fact, there is among us a “History” directed to the advantage of the Latin theses that seeks to denigrate the Semitic origins. But we, descendents of Portuguese, are the product of a miscegenated culture which owes nothing to the withered, monkish harvest of Port Royal, which brought forth as its standard bearer the dry Protestant Blaise Pascal. Lisbon, even today, is a barbarous city where the most beautiful humanity on Earth intermingles.
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. . . Later, with colonization, we were shaped by a culture with an ample vision— that of the Jesuits. Unfortunately, this was cut short by the incomprehension of Rome when [the Jesuits], in their desire for eclecticism and human and religious communication, were bringing the Church to the pagan limits of the Malabar rites. It was the Mozarabs from Spain and Portugal who filled the holds of the caravels. Remaining forever at the portal of the Utopias, is that Portuguese navigator, weathered by the Atlantic sun, whom the English chancellor Thomas More reports to have met in the nave of Antwerp Cathedral and who opened his eyes to the American paradises of the Discovery.
. . . Monotheism could resist and fight against another monotheism until it would graft itself onto the Counter Reformation and into the understanding lassitude of the Jesuits. In the European North, the orthodox branch of Christianity would break, [divided] between the totemism of the Saints and local divinities (in Italy and France) and the inflexible trunk from which Calvin and Luther carved their doctrine of Election. Meanwhile, the singular God of the desert, the God of the caravans, would metamorphose, transformed into Christ, into the God of the Caravels, [carried] beneath the sympathetic conveyance of the Jesuit cassocks toward the conquest of America. It was this religion of the Caravels that presided over the heaving swells of the Utopias, mostly of the two situated at the opening of the era of the Voyages of Discovery imagined by More and Campanella. The Reconquista was a purely superficial political and military phenomenon. Arabization had already racialized the Peninsula, producing this minuscule but gigantic Portugal that marked the apogee of the Baroque as well as all the art of its time.
Arabization had already changed into the inaugural robes of [Ignatius of] Loyola. In a thesis [written for a faculty position at] the University [of São Paulo], years ago, I wrote: “The Jesuits are the Mohammedans of Christ. [There is] in their explosive burst of energy a strange fire that cannot disguise its Arabic roots. They are soldiers more than priests and [the Marquis of] Pombal would accuse them of lacking faith, saying: ‘It is incredible that so many men work to ruin the dogma of faith without being atheists.’” Coming from Arabia, petrified and emerging from the desert, the Saracens would intermingle on the [Iberian] Peninsula, in order to pursue over the oceanic routes their exogamous and conquering impulse, which brought with it the erratic and the fantastic, adventure and fatalism. And [this impulse] would only be stilled in the green [lands] of the Discovery. In the Island of Vera Cruz, Island of Santa Cruz, Island of Utopia: Brazil.
1
The “Questão dos Bispos” involved an altercation between Dom Pedro II and the Brazilian bishops who had arranged for the expulsion of Freemasons from lay brotherhoods. For overstepping their authority, the bishops were arrested and convicted; in 1875, the Emperor, who had supported their conviction, ultimately commuted their sentences.—Ed.
2
In the seventeenth century, the Bandeirantes were the adventurers and explorers from the region of the then Province of São Paulo who entered the hinterlands of the territory, going beyond the Line of Tordesillas, searching for gold and precious stones.—Ed.