The same and the other of José de Anchieta

Abstract

José de Anchieta, canonized by Pope Francis on April 2014, one of the key figures of the first colonization in Brazil, has aroused a wide range of responses from unconditional approval to fundamental disapproval in the 20th-century. In an attempt to break the stalemate, this article looks to the possibility of thinking about Anchieta from the perspective of experience: the inner experience of God according to the teaching of Ignatius of Loyola, that is, the experience of “the union of the mind and heart”, supported by the Jesuit epistolography, the experience of the meeting of cultures considered as a way to persuasion, and the experience trailing behind ideology considered as a conflictuous way. The second part of the article illustrates the possibilities of the suggested approach, analyzing the reflection of the experience of the encounter of cultures present in the dramatic composition known as On the Feast of St. Lawrence. Trying to identify reasons for the unusual number of readings and misreadings, we consider poetic, theological, political and cultural aspects that made the 16th-century missionary become, to the thinking of modern people, an Other more other than our customary Other – the native people of the New World.