Father António Vieira, who lived between 1608 and 1697, mainly in Portugal and Brazil, was a Jesuit priest, a preacher in the Portuguese court and the king's counsellor, a political ambassador, a missionary and an anti-slavery militant. He was an eloquent speaker and a perfect writer; his work approaches twenty-five volumes, which are comprised of approximately two hundred sermons, more than five hundred letters and many political and literary manuscripts.
 
No Portuguese prose writer can be compared to him in terms of exuberance and range of vocabulary used. Vieira was a powerful intelligence who had the opportunity to keep in touch with the intellectual world of that time — namely during his diplomatic missions in France, Holland and Italy and during the period of six years when he lived in Rome — and he became so famous that he was considered the greatest spirit of his century.
 
An exceptional character, he was courageous enough to assert his own personal interpretations of certain theological subjects, deviating from the conservative vision of the Jesuit order to which he belonged. Because of that, he was persecuted and arrested. He remained in prison for some years in solitary confinement, in a very small and gloomy place, without light, poorly ventilated, and with just a bed, a water-pot, a little table, a stool and a vase. He was eventually sentenced to death by fire, but in fact he was never executed.
 
António Vieira renounced comfort and personally convenient situations, remaining faithful to true Christian principles. He did nothing to avoid being arrested, and once in prison, he didn't let himself down psychologically — he always kept his dignity untouched. He knew himself as the Immortal Man, and the ups-and-downs of life didn't change his inner strength; he knew his torturers were spiritually inferior and their injustice wouldn't last long.
 
The moral and material tortures inflicted on him by the members of the clergy, at the time of the Inquisition, made him understand the declining principles of the Christian Church and strengthened his desire to work to reestablish the Truth of the principles taught by Jesus Christ, contributing this way to a greater spiritualization of humankind. He foresaw and promoted a universal spiritualist Christian movement, based on the theory of successive lives and in the principle of equality of Man — as Energy and Matter — before the natural and unchangeable laws that rule the Universe.
The Fifth Empire — the "wonder" of the great "change" in motion on the "theatre" of the world through the "triumph of Christ", by a Portuguese action — was considered by many a crazy dream and the fundamental myth of his prophetic vision.
 
However, many thinkers from our century value Vieira's perspective. Among them let's quote Fernando Pessoa: "The future of the Lusitanian race is the Fifth Empire. The future of Portugal — which I don't guess but know — is already written, for those who can read it, in Bandarra's ballads, and also in Nostradamus's four line stanzas. That future is for us to be everything. Who, as Portuguese, can live within the narrowness of just one personality, of just one nation, of just one faith? Which true Portuguese can, for example, live within the sterile narrowness of Catholicism when, outside it, there are all the Protestantisms, all the western creeds, all dead and living Paganinsms?… Let’s not wish that outside us remains just one God! Let’s absorb all the gods! We’ve already conquered the Sea, we still have Heaven to conquer.”.
 
“In the Fifth Empire there will be a meeting of two forces, which have been long separated, but are coming closer: the left side, wisdom – that is, science, thought, intellectual speculation –, and the right side – that is occult knowledge, intuition.”
 
 

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