W poszukiwaniu kondycji transkulturowej. António Vieira i Giorgio Agamben jako czytelnicy Listów Pawłowych

Abstract

António Vieira, a seventeenth-century Portuguese Jesuit, heterodox thinker persecuted by the Inquisition, and missionary working in the Brazilian province of Maranhão, stands comparison with Giorgio Agamben as a reader of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. In spite of dissimilar historical circumstances, both ask the crucial questions concerning universalism and may be regarded as theoreticians of the transcultural condition, understood in this essay as a state of naked, prelapsarian humanity beyond any cultural distinction. This primordial undressed condition – Unbekleidetheit that Agamben found in the theology of Erik Peterson – might become available again due to the passage into the eschatological time, the kairós of Paul. As one can imagine, Vieira might have lacked sufficient intellectual freedom to fully verbalize all the implications of his vision of the spiritual Fifth Empire unifying mankind. These silenced views that the inquisitorial archives failed to transmit to our times may be recuperated, at least as a hypothesis, through the confrontation of the two readers of Paul and the reflection on the possible transcultural horizons as well as shortcomings of Vieira’s visionary thought.