Padrão dos Descobrimentos

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Book Length: 288 pages

Camões is to Portugal what Shakespeare is to Britain. And as with Shakespeare, the brilliant art of Portugal’s bard has made him foundational in the literature of all the nations that were colonized by his homeland. Despite, however, the international prevalence of the Portuguese language—a language with a substantial presence in five continents and that boasts approximately 266 million speakers¹—Camões is a poet little acknowledged in the Anglophone world. His greatest work, The Lusíads, is a tale that exalts the faith and virtue of the heroic explorer Vasco da Gama and his men in epic language. Through blending history and myth, Camões colorfully tells the truth through allegory; the attempts of Bacchus, the god of unruliness, to thwart the fateful voyage of the Portuguese to India and the counter-assaults of the amorous Venus to save it are a means of artistic illustration. Such illustrations, though not true by the test of jot and tittle, elaborate the higher significance of the real events far better than a dry reading of them would entail.

Thus the poet declares in the beginning of Canto One that he is to write of the explorers, “those matchless heroes” (I. 1), and the kings of his nation who “magnified Christ and Empire” (I. 2). One cannot but notice this persistent theme throughout the work: the uniting of the cause of the Faith and the ascendant Portuguese. By no means is this an artificial nationalism; it is the logical conclusion of the Two Swords expressed in poetry. Undoubtedly what must add to the authenticity of Camões’ message is that he was no mere warrior of the pen—this was a man who lost an eye while fighting the Moors in North Africa, and yet followed the “five blue shields” (III. 54) of his beloved country into the alluring East, opened by Da Gama decades before.

It is this zeal for Christ and his nation that translates into a profound love of the whole of Christendom. From this love emanates his denunciations of the divisions within Christian Europe, and his intense appeal for unity among them. The poet’s voice powerfully opens Canto Seven by charging specific European nations for their immoralities and crimes, and proceeds to contrast the internecine religious quarreling and fratricidal political struggles of Europe to the comparatively more unified Mohammendan world. Thus he aptly remarks:

What safety lies in such a stratagem
—To have two enemies, yourselves and them?

(VII. 10)

He then enjoins the Christian nations to set aside their disputes and rally their forces against the Ottomans, urging them with these beautifully forceful words:

Drive the Turkish multitudes back

To the caves of the Caspian mountains

And cold Scythia, before they conjure up

Any more problems for wealthy Europe.

(VII. 12)

Sensing, however, that his proposal will fall on deaf ears, he pivots to condemn the contemporary state of affairs while praising the efforts of his country:

But while in your blind, insane frenzy

You thirst for your brothers’ blood in Christ,

There will be no lack of Christian daring

In this little house of Portugal.

(VII. 14)

Thus Portugal, though a “little house”, will take upon itself the work that larger and more powerful members of Christendom are neglecting—war against the infidel and the fulfilling of the Great Commission. It is then not the size of a nation’s borders or population that one should look to for its greatest strength, but the spirit of its people.

Moral lessons such as these are not uncommon in The Lusíads; they appear often throughout the text, and Camões’ style involves a volta wherein a specific moral is communicated to the reader at the end of each Canto. In a poem so concerned with comparisons between Antiquity and Christendom, these edifying turns do much to demonstrate the clear and perfect morality that was inaugurated by Christ. We are then aided by the poet in our journey alongside the brave Da Gama, “whose genius / Snatched renown from wandering Aeneas” (I. 12).

The artistic employment of gods and goddesses from the Ancient Greco-Roman world in an epic poem about the Christian Occident discovering the pagan Orient may indeed seem an odd juxtaposition, but their inclusion is no mere aesthetic quirk of the Renaissance. As had been the case with Dante, the presence of these heathen figures is allegorical. Instead of outright stating the high themes of his tale in more literal terms, Camões utilizes these recognizable entities from the old myths and pantheons to convey it by means of literary illustration. This impresses the themes through images, which kindle the fires of the imagination. Hence in one place he writes:

For the ocean nymphs in all their beauty,

Tethys, and the magic painted island,

Are nothing more than those delightful

Honours which make our lives sublime.

(IX. 89)

Honor, which is by nature abstract, is more easily communicated to the reader through the presence of the nymphs, Tethys, and the “magic painted island”—all of which are detailed by the poet, thus rendering his message palpable. If he would have preferred to write dryly of the events he retells, then he would not have written poetry. And undoubtedly posterity is grateful that he did not make that decision.

This is a book to be recommended to all students of Western literature, and especially to those who are Catholic. The heroism of the Portuguese, and the poetic brilliance of Camões ought to inspire us today in a Western world facing population decline. A portal and a mirror are offered to us in The Lusíads: a portal to a time when the West, though fractured, was unashamedly Christendom; a mirror to our own time, in which the West is increasingly threatened from within and from without by the forces of Islam and other false cults. Let us then not be afraid of stepping in the one and looking into the other. We must realize that, as Portugal’s epic proves, it is not numbers that save nations: authentic faith and virtue do. The miracles at Fatima over a century ago stand as a solid testament that God has not forgotten Portugal, small in land yet truly magnanimous. By extension, can this not be said of the rest of the West?

1. “What Are The Top 200 Most Spoken Languages?” Ethnologue.com.
   https://www.ethnologue.com/insights/ethnologue200/.