A sociedade do corpo místico: a formação do império e a fundação da América Portuguesa

Abstract

The marine expansion and the great Discoveries caused changes in the world vision that, until the beginning of the XVth century, guaranteed intelligence to the political-social organization of the Iberian nations. In Portugal, the conquests in the East and the arrival of the Portuguese to the New World demanded a (re) building of the cosmological structure under which was settled the religious and political-social principles of the nation and of the society. Starting from the first decades of the XVIth century, with the beginning of the reign of D. João III, also began a process of confession (re)Christianization - of the societies in the kingdom and in the colonial areas of the overseas with the objective of providing the sharing of a same group of ethical, moral, religious and political-social values among all the subjects of the Empire. Evidently, such sharing of values didn't happen without collisions and conflicts in function of the own specifics of the societies that integrated the Empire. The role of the Church - only institution that possessed means of disseminating that group of values for the vastness of the imperial areas - was preponderant. In that sense, outstands the Jesuits' missionaries action in the Brazilian territory. The land of brasis was constituted at a powerful laboratory of improvement of the instruments that served to the social domain that intended to organize the society as a mystic body, in which the king was the head" and the subjects hierarchily integrated the other "parts" of the human body. Such an organic composition of the society should be "harmoniously" accepted because the king was the representative of the divine wish on Earth. The exchange of powers between Church and State made possible the association of the concepts of good Christian and good subject, and also provided from the XVIIth century the theoretical constitution of a theological-political reason of State that marked the actions of the Crown in the running of imperial businesses - as it can be noted in the practices of representation of the societies in Kingdom and in the Portuguese America especially until the first half of the XVIIIth century.