“O mal no mundo, o mal em nós”, os homens que não nasceram para a desumanidade: uma análise da teologia humanista de José Saramago

Abstract

Saramago, famously, is an author who chooses literature as a way to reflect about reality, by means of a proccess of fictionalization, merged with a singular inventiveness. However, he doesn’t settle for projecting his writings in the sphere of reality, bringing ideas that combine damning and violent data of the current experience with the incorporation of unusual elements, that lead to paths of construction of a humanity marked by the practice of evil and the return to the subjectivity of the human being, still able to love another and thyself. The result is a literature that occupies the empty place left by the rational existence of humanity. Transported by this lack, the author’s writing gives readers the opportunity to experience a world that still isn’t, but that can be, thus revealing plenty of our social and human reality, especially in the works chosen by us to be analyzed in this work, namely: The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), Blindness (1995) and Seeing (2004). In these texts, what can be experienced is a “rehearsal” of what can be the fate of the human being, in case they remain encrusted in the state of deep reification and massification in which they are found today. As a consequence, we notice arising in his writings a particularly analytic and critical view about man and his relation to evil and the world, entangled by a pessimistic discourse which reveals, in turn, a hope commited in human capacity. All of this grounded in a tone that assumes a markedly humanist point of view. Adopting this path, we build our proposal of a thesis, based in the necessity of understanding the humanism materialized by Saramago in his artistic output, in which he brings a redemptive view of humanity, by means of the theory of the incarnation of Jesus Christ, tensioning this humanism as existencial. Adopting a comparative perspective, that not only resembles but problematizes, questions and relativizes the dialogue developed with the philosophical, theological and sociological discourse that fundamentalizes our research, we aim, through a bibliographical, critical and qualitative study of the chosen works, to realize our goals of research. For that, we appeal to the theoretical reading of Perrone-Moisés (1990), Barthes (1980), Candido (2011), Wisnik (2020), Hannah Arendt (2020), Sartre (2009), Byung-Chul Han (2018), Carlos Nogueira (2022), among others, who will be essential to understand the gears that conduct the world to such a state.