The pagan sympathizes with Christian superstition, because the man who isn’t superstitious isn’t a man, but he feels no sympathy for humanitarianism, since the humanitarian isn’t human.
For the pagan each thing has its nymph, or genius. Each thing is a captive nymph, or a dryad caught by our gaze; that’s why everything, for him, has an astonishing immediate reality, and he feels fellowship with each thing when he sees it, and friendship when he touches it.
The man who sees in each object some other object than what’s there cannot see, love, or feel that object. Whoever values something because it was created by “God” values it not for what it is but for what it recalls. His eyes behold the object, but his thoughts lie elsewhere.
The pantheist, who values each object for its participation in the whole, likewise sees one thing in order to think about another, likewise looks in order not to see. He doesn’t think of the object, but of its continuity with the rest of the world. How can a thing be loved by someone who loves it because of a principle that’s outside it? The first and last rule of love is that the beloved object should be loved for what it is and not for something else, loved for being the object of love and not because there’s a “reason” to love it.
The pure materialist or rationalist, for whom each thing is marvelous because of the work “Nature” put into it and because of its latent, throbbing energy, the planetary system that’s in each of its atoms and that makes it live—this man likewise does not love or see the thing, he likewise looks at one thing while thinking of something else, namely its composition. When he beholds an object, he meditates on its decomposition. That is why no materialist ever made art; no materialist or rationalist ever looked at the world. Between him and the world the mysticism of science dropped its veil, the microscope, and he tripped in reality as if into a deep well. For him each thing, instead of being appreciated as a person of earth, is a screen through which he atomistically peers, just as for the pantheist it is a screen or window for perceiving the Whole, and for the creationist a screen through which to see God. When the contemplation is intense, the screen is forgotten. Who cares about the window through which he intently looked? For mystical Christians, for pantheistic dreamers, for materialists and men of “reason,” the world is merely their thoughts. The Christian error of substituting man for nature is the disease that has made all of them decrepit from birth.
from Preface to the Complete Poems of Alberto Caeiro: Ricardo Reis
Ricardo Reis, like fellow heteronym Álvaro de Campos, was an avid writer of prose as well as of poetry, and one of his favorite prose pursuits was to find fault with his colleague. This was not hard to do, since the two were temperamental opposites. Classically minded Reis took Campos to task for being formally undisciplined in his poetry, and sensation-driven Campos counterattacked by saying that Reis hid his true self, including his sexuality (which was either bi or homo), behind his complex syntax. The one thing they agreed on was the sublime genius of Alberto Caeiro, for whom Campos wrote his anecdotal Notes for the Memory of My Master Caeiro, while Reis—in a more theoretical and analytical mode—wrote a monumental, though fragmentary, preface to Caeiro’s poetry. Besides eulogizing Caeiro and critically appraising his work, Reis’s preface expounds on the principles of paganism and makes an ardent appeal for its modern-day reconstruction. The four fragments that follow are concerned almost entirely with this latter aspect, though they keep referring to Caeiro, who was for Reis—as for Antonio Mora—the perfect embodiment of paganism.
The work of Caeiro represents the total reconstruction of paganism in its absolute essence, such as could never have been achieved even by the Greeks or Romans, who lived under paganism and hence didn’t think about it. But his work and his paganism were not thought out, nor were they felt: they came from that part of us that runs even deeper than feeling or reason. To say more would be to enter into useless explanations; to affirm less would be to lie. Every work speaks for itself, with its own particular voice and in that language by which it mentally took shape; whoever doesn’t understand cannot understand, and to explain it to him is like enunciating words to try to make someone understand a language he doesn’t speak.
With no knowledge of life, scant knowledge of literature, and virtually no culture or human fellowship, Caeiro produced his work by way of a deep and imperceptible progression, like the one that guides the logical development of civilizations, via the unconscious consciousness of humans. It was a progression in his feelings, or in the way he felt his feelings, and an evolution in the thoughts born out of those progressive feelings. Through a superhuman intuition, resembling those on which new religions are founded for eternity but without being religious itself, since it rejects all religions and all metaphysics for the simple reason that they reject the sun and the rain, this man discovered the world without thinking about it, and created a concept of the universe that doesn’t consist of an interpretation.
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When I once had occasion, almost four years ago in Lisbon, to show Alberto Caeiro what principles his work naturally led to, he denied that it led to those principles. For Caeiro, as an absolute objectivist, even the pagan gods were a deformation of paganism. In his abstract objectivism there was no place for the gods. He understood all too well that they were made in the image and likeness of material things, and for him that was enough to make them worthless.
I see things in a different light. The Greek gods represent the abstract conceptualization of materializing objectivism. We cannot live without abstract ideas, since without them we cannot think, but whatever reality we attribute to those ideas should have its origin in the same matter from where we extracted them. So it is with the gods. Although abstract ideas have no true reality, they do have a human reality, valid only in the place that the human species occupies in the world. The gods belong to the category of abstractions by virtue of their relationship to reality, but they do not belong to that category as pure abstractions, because they aren’t pure abstractions. Just as abstract ideas help us to live among things, the gods help us to live among men. The gods are thus real and unreal at the same time. They are unreal because they aren’t realities, but they are real as materialized abstractions. A materialized abstraction becomes pragmatically real; an unmaterialized abstraction isn’t even real in this limited sense. Plato, when he made ideas into abstract persons, followed the old pagan process for creating gods, but he placed his gods too far out of reach. An idea becomes a God only when it is brought back to materiality. It then becomes a force of Nature. That’s what a God is. Whether that’s a reality, I don’t know. Personally I believe in the existence of the gods; I believe in their infinite number and in the possibility of man ascending to god......
The creator of civilization is a force of Nature and therefore a god, or a demigod.
Alberto Caeiro is more pagan than paganism, for he is more conscious of paganism in its essence than any other pagan writer. How can a pagan be a pagan, if he conceives his mental and spiritual attitude in opposition to a different system of sensibility, such as Christianity? And when the conflict broke out between paganism and Christianity, with the latter winning out, the torpid and decadent mentality of the Roman people was already basically Christian and not pagan at all. We can see this in Julian’s attempt to react against Christianity. This emperor sincerely wanted to reestablish paganism, at a time when its spirit—alas for Julian!—no longer existed, and the cult of the gods that survived was marked by a superstitiousness more typical of Christism than of any species of paganism. Julian’s very ideas confirm the impossibility of reconstructing paganism in that day and age. Julian was a Mithraist,* which nowadays would make him a theosophist or an occultist. He based his reconstruction of paganism on a chimerical fusion of it with oriental elements that the craze for mysticism had incorporated into the spirit of the age. And so it failed, for paganism had already died, the way all things die, except for the Gods and their inscrutable, tormenting science.
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For modern pagans, as exiles in the midst of an enemy civilization, the only feasible course is to embrace one of the last two schools of pagan thought: Stoicism or Epicureanism. Alberto Caeiro embraced neither, for he was Absolute Paganism, without further implications or ramifications. By contrast I (if I may speak about myself) have chosen to be both an Epicurean and a Stoic, convinced as I am of the useless-ness of every action in a world where action has gone awry, and of every thought in a world that has forgotten how to think.
It may seem we’re no more than degenerate sons of Christian civilization, indifferent because we’re sick or out of sorts, but the truth is quite different. A mysterious fate has displaced us. As if we were engineers born in the African hinterlands, we have capacities that we’re unable to develop, the outlines of a destiny that we’re unable to complete. Our spirit is far removed from the hardened, centuries-old lie of humanitarian monotheism that characterizes Christianity. We can only loathe this civilization so false it has no slaves, so imperfect it must subordinate the intelligence to emotions; and the more it seems to retreat from its religious disease, the more it inclines toward it, for the more it follows after those humanitarian deliriums that typify the slave mentality or, alternatively, it hardens into the absurd rigidity of that discipline so beloved of the Germans, an exaggerated and false paganism—which only goes to show how our civilized mentality has lost its capacity for equilibrium, moderation, and reason.
But who is this “we” in whose name I speak? The only people I can think of are myself, the late Alberto Caeiro, and two others from among everyone I know. But even if it were just me, it wouldn’t matter. If it were a thousand people, I would feel no differently. Those whom the gods one day allowed to see the truth of things in their irreducible simplicity need only clear-mindedness and a staunch heart, for they can never go back to delighting in the saturnalias of humanitarianism and modern life.
Everything else lies in that point of light we call the Shadows, that vast Point prior to the Gods where—in accord with the absolute mortality of our souls—our ephemeral lives uselessly tend, uselessly arrive, and uselessly remain forever.
PORTUGAL AND THE FIFTH EMPIRE
While Pessoa is best known for his directly literary output, he also wrote voluminously on politics, sociology, and religion—disciplines that to his “neopagan” way of thinking were not readily separable. Pessoa’s politics, as far as they can be reduced to specific views on government policy, look rather conservative, but his political theories were too idealistic to be of much practical value. As a self-styled “mystical nationalist,” he dreamed of a post-Catholic Portugal whose society would be modeled after ancient Greece, where religion, politics, and culture were still intimately linked. The logical first step for arriving at that Utopia was—in his view—to clear away not only the Catholicism that was stultifying Portugal but also the nation’s ineffectual political and economic systems, which the birth of the Republic in 1910 did little to invigorate, and so Pessoa was inclined to support the military coups of and 1926, and he was initially sympathetic to the capable finance minister named Salazar, who began to consolidate his grip on the government in the late 1920s. Seeing dictatorship as a perhaps useful, or necessary, stopgap measure to lift the country out of the doldrums and to prepare it for a new kind of national consciousness, Pessoa wrote and published, in 1928, a pamphlet titled Interregnum: Defense and Justification of Military Dictatorship in Portugal. But by the time Salazar became firmly entrenched, in 1932, Pessoa was disenchanted, and in an autobiographical sketch drawn up in 1935 he renounced his Interregnum, stating that it should be considered “nonexistent.” Pessoa had apparently become convinced that idealism does not usually make for good politics, for in the same brief sketch of his life and works, in a paragraph labeled “Political Ideology,” he wrote: “Believes that a monarchy would be the most appropriate system for an organically imperial nation such as Portugal. Believes, at the same time, that monarchy is not at all feasible in Portugal, so that if there were a referendum to choose between regimes, he would reluctantly vote for the Republic. English-style conservative, meaning that within his conservatism he is a liberal, and utterly antireactionary.” And he summed up his brand of patriotism in the words “Everything for Humanity; nothing against the Nation”—an obvious gibe at Salazar’s famous “Nothing against the Nation; everything for the Nation.”
Pessoa’s ambitious hope for the future of his country was nothing less than its intellectual and cultural primacy among nations, and the basis for that hope was the preeminence achieved by the Portuguese some centuries earlier as the world’s leading navigators of unknown seas and discoverers of new lands. If tiny Portugal, against all odds, had forged the world’s greatest maritime empire, then why couldn’t it—against similar odds—forge the world’s greatest literature? Pessoa was betting it could, and he enlisted not only history but Portuguese mythology to support his thesis.
Portuguese mythology was born when its history derailed, in 1578, the year that set off one of the most precipitous national downfalls in modern European history. After its armed forces were killed and captured almost to a man in a harebrained expedition to Morocco, once-proud Portugal teetered this way and that until, two years later, it fell under Spanish rule as into a mother’s lap. The name of Sebastião, the ingenuous king who had led the Portuguese troops to their certain slaughter, perhaps deserved to be forgotten, but quite the opposite happened. Among the thousands of Portuguese corpses that littered the battlefield, his was not found, and it was said that the king had taken refuge on a desert isle and would return one foggy morning as the Encoberto, the Hidden One, to free Portugal from the Spanish yoke.
Portugal regained its independence from Spain in 1640, but national fortunes continued to flounder, and the wealth that poured in from Brazil in the eighteenth century had scant impact on the widespread poverty, and so the Sebastianist myth lived on, in transfigured forms sustained by new explanations. As late as the mid-twentieth century it was possible, on a foggy morning, to find men and women along the Portuguese coastline, looking out across the waves for the Desejado, the Desired One, their mythical king and savior. But most Sebastianists, such as Pessoa, invested the myth with symbolic meaning, availing themselves of the endlessly interpretable verses penned by Gonqalo Anes Bandana, a Portuguese cobbler, poet, and prophet from the sixteenth century whose work was publicized by the Jesuit preacher and missionary Antonio Vieira (1608-67), one of Portugal’s greatest writers of the Baroque period. Through numerical puzzles and obscure imagery, Bandana’s versified dreams allegedly predicted not only the return of King Sebastiao but also the establishment, in Portugal, of the Fifth Empire, which represented a new twist on a millenary dream—that of Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, recorded in the second chapter of the Book of Daniel. The third text in this section presents a traditional understanding of Daniel’s interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, followed by Pessoa’s own “spiritual” scheme, in which cultural rather than military might reigns supreme. Elsewhere in his writings, Pessoa left a different version of this scheme, with the British Empire instead of Europe occupying the fourth slot, but in either case the Fifth Empire was reserved for Portugal and would coincide with the final return of King Sebastião.
In presaging Portugal’s ascendancy merely through its language and literature (where its cultural strength lay, according to Pessoa), the Fifth Empire doctrine presupposed a new era in human consciousness and civilization, in which such a purely “spiritual,” immaterial domination would be possible. That era would even be marked by a new kind of love, whose nature Pessoa planned to exemplify in a long poem titled “Anteros,”* after the younger brother of Eros (Cupid for the Romans). The poem never got written, but from prose passages in his archives we know that Pessoa understood Anteros not as the avenger of unrequited love (which is how his mythological function is more commonly perceived) but as an anti-Cupid. Eros, for Pessoa, r
epresented instinctive, sensually motivated love, and Anteros dispassionate, intellectual love—the transcendence of carnal love. This gloss swells with significance when viewed in the light of Pessoa’s lifelong inexperience and avowed disinterest in sensual love, coupled with his ultrapersonalized understanding of just when King Sebastiao would return to usher in the Fifth Empire. Taking one of Bandarra’s whimsical prophecies—that “the King will return after thirty scissors have gone by”—Pessoa multiplied 31 by 2, added it to 1578, the year King Sebastidã went down in battle, and came up with 1640, which is when Sebastidã supposedly made his symbolic first return to liberate Portugal from Spanish rule; then, multiplying 31 by 10 and adding it to 1578, Pessoa arrived at what he proposed as the year of the king’s Second Coming, 1888, the year of his very own birth. This would seem to indicate that Pessoa’s megalomania took the form of a Christ complex, with literature as the latter-day saving grace. Or perhaps he was just pulling the leg of posterity.
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Any Empire not founded on the Spiritual Empire is a walking Death, a ruling Corpse.
The Spiritual Empire can only be achieved, to any useful purpose, in a small nation, where growth of the national ideal won’t lead to ambitions of territorial domination, which would undermine what had begun as a psychical imperialism, diverting it from its spiritual destiny. That’s what happened to the German nation; it was too large to be able to achieve its supreme destiny as a spiritual imperialist. The contrary happened to us, the Portuguese, when the discoveries led us to attempt a material imperialism, which we didn’t have enough people to impose.
The Selected Prose of Fernando Pessoa Page 18