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Chapter  Dreams and Prophecies The Fifth Empire of Father Antonio Vieira and Messianic Visions of the Bragança Dynasty in Seventeenth-Century Portugal and Brazil luı́s filipe silvério lima translated by anna luisa geselbracht In 1699, two years after his death, Father Antonio Vieira (1608–97) appeared in the dreams of his fellow Jesuit and old friend Father José Suares. On his deathbed in Salvador da Bahia, capital of the state of Brazil, Suares dreamed he was crying and Vieira was drying his tears. With this illustrious vision, the dying man felt comforted, and he prepared to die in peace.1 Retold and highlighted as a caso notavel (notable case) by Father João Antonio Andreoni, the rector of the college in Bahia and Vieira’s former assistant, the episode indicated Vieira’s growing prestige and authority within the Jesuit Order—an authority confirmed in heaven by his sudden appearance in dreams as a messenger from the beyond. Vieira’s authority, however, was derived less from postmortem miracles or visitations in dreams than from the legacy of his sermons, his—often controversial— missionary and political activity, and the ideas he expressed during his life about the coming ‘‘Fifth Empire.’’ This essay shows how Vieira’s understanding of the Fifth Empire framed the Portuguese monarchy, its overseas dominions, and the Society of Jesus—with its efforts to convert the ‘‘foreign peoples’’ of the New World to Christianity—as agents and executors of a divine plan for the final chapter of human history. Dreams and Prophecies 105 Contemporaries treated Vieira’s appearances to others in their dreams and visions as evidence of a divine design that would ultimately be realized in the Fifth Empire, rather than as a sign of Vieira’s own saintliness— something that would have been inappropriate for this modest seventeenthcentury ecclesiastic and man of letters. In life, Vieira had cast himself as an incisive and ingenious interpreter of dreams and visions, analyzing them both theologically and politically. Thus, on the rare occasions when something was revealed to him in dreams, it was as corroboration of the correct interpretation of revelation given to others. Vieira affirmed his role as interpreter in his Livro anteprimeiro da Historia do Futuro, a prophetic tract written during the 1660s and printed, posthumously, in 1718. In it, the Jesuit sought to interpret the dream prophecies written about the future of Portugal in the same way that the biblical figures Daniel and Joseph had deciphered the dreams of kings and pharaohs.2 As he made clear, he accomplished this not because he had some divine quality of his own, but because he served as a ‘‘small instrument’’ of divine Providence. As a Jesuit priest, Vieira was an instrument authorized by the Tridentine church. He sought to demonstrate—with support from a variety of sources—the truth of prophetic dreams announcing the arrival of a fifth and final empire. This empire would be led by the Portuguese people (the new Chosen People) under their king, who would be of the Bragança dynasty, and who would cooperate with the Holy See through the person of the pope. In Historia do Futuro, dreams provided essential evidence to support the notion of a Fifth Empire. Vieira believed three biblical prophecies (two in Daniel and one in Ezra) had described the succession of four empires: Chaldean, Persian, Greek, and Roman. Two of these prophecies had been revealed in dreams: Daniel’s prophecy of the four beasts (Dan. 7) and Nebuchadnezzar’s vision of a statue made of gold, silver, brass, iron, and clay (Dan. 2).3 This last was perhaps the most important for Vieira’s Fifth Empire as well as for the messianic and millenarian beliefs of the seventeenth century.4 Vieira, however, was also inspired by another source: the sixteenth-century Trovas (rhymed quatrains) by the cobbler of Trancoso, Gonçalo Anes Bandarra, a text organized around three dreams. The Trovas had circulated and been widely read throughout the Iberian Peninsula since the end of the sixteenth century. Printed in Portuguese on French presses in 1603 and 1644,5 Bandarra’s dreams were themselves an interpretation of biblical prophecies, presented as analogous to (2024-04-20 04:49 GMT) 106 European Experiences of Dreaming the visions of Nebuchadnezzar, Daniel, and Ezra, which gave Bandarra ‘‘a role as intermediary of the divine message and will.’’6 The significance Vieira attributed to dreams was hardly unique. In the seventeenth century, the exegesis of biblical...

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