Eduardo Lourenço's Perspective on the Relationship between Portugal and Europe.

Azorean poet and ideologue Eduardo Lourenço

Beginning in the 19th century, the relationship between Portugal and Europe from a cultural point of view has been a problem to Portuguese intellectuals. E. Lourenço is not the first one to treat the problem although he certainly is the one, in contemporary Portugal, who has done it more extensively and more deeply than most. The Azorean poet and ideologue of his generation (the same generation as Eça de Queiroz), Antero de Quental, wrote the most influential treatment of this problem in 1871. The work is entitled: "Causes of the peninsular peoples decadence in the last three centuries." It was a speech delivered in May 27, 1871 in Lisbon and intended to be the first of a series of conferences by other authors, namely the novelist Eça de Queiroz, the historian Oliveira Martins and others that later became known as "the 70's generation." A. de Quental tries to find offers an explaination for the cultural decadence of Portugal and Spain after the glorious epoch of the discoveries and before. He describes the Iberian contribution, including that of Iberian Jews and Moors, to European culture during the middle ages and the Renaissance. Those contributions were important to both philosophy and literature in the work of Maimonides and Averrois, Camões and Cervantes, and others.

His argument is that the Iberian peoples opened the world to Europe for the first time, with the Portuguese going east and the Spaniards going west. But suddenly, after 50 or 60 years, everything changed: "from this brilliant world, created by the peninsular genius in its free expansion, we became, almost without transition, a dark, inert, poor, unintelligent and half unknown world." Why? The verdict is clearly stated: "it was essentially because of lack of science that we descended, we degraded ourselves, we nullified ourselves. The modern soul had completely died inside." Furthermore, the inquisition weighed on the consciences and suppressed the "public spirit" under "the pressure of terror." According to A. de Quental the causes of the peninsular decadence-reflected in the absence of science-- were three: moral, political, and economic.

Visiting Scholar Tito C. Cunha

The moral cause is in the "transformation of Catholicism by the Council of Trent. The political, cause was the establishment of absolutism" erasing all public local liberties. And the third cause was an economy based on conquest.

In 1926, António Sérgio published a text entitled "The Cadaveric Kingdom or the problem of culture in Portugal" (O reino Cadaveroso ou o problema da cultura em Portugal) echoing and expanding on these themes. Here he argues that "the problem of culture, the problem of mentality: this is the gravest problem in Portuguese society" The immediate cause of this decadence was the Counter Reformation and the Inquisition. The effect was to destroy and drive away the "estrangeirados," i.e. the Portuguese Jews and others who escaped to Amsterdam. Important scientists and philosophers, such as Spinoza's family, were among them. In 1949 Sergio delivered another speech in which he sounded more hopeful: He argued that Portugal could transcend this decadence, like the home coming of someone who has been driven away by negative forces.

To E. Lourenço, writing at the same time, what Portuguese culture lacked the most was Liberty. But finally, 30 years later, the liberation arrived. The empire ended and suddenly, 5 centuries later, in a text called "Europe and the question of imaginary;" E. Lourenço stresses the existence among the Portuguese of a "European imaginary" created by the Greeks, which frames European cultural identity in all the European space. The other great cornerstone of European identity, Christianity, makes Portugal an integral part of the European historical and cultural community that old Europe is made of.

As for America, meaning the USA, Lourenço hesitates between seeing its imaginary as almost a prolongation of the European imaginary or with an imaginary of its own "that is becoming an universal imaginary," namely through cinema, because "in America there is the whole world."

Europe, and Portugal with it, is like a civilization of disquietude. Not because of the "same" but of the "other" within. Besides, Europe's imaginary birth turns around a mythology of unquietness, remaining nameless about its own identity.

Turning to Portugal, he argues that his native land has always had a very strong cultural identity but suffered from a lack of external recognition. Portugal was a homogeneous country for too long. In language, religion, and ethnicity, nothing changed. Europe, on the other hand, experienced constant change, from continuous civil war to growing diversity and differences, incorporating "the other" into European culture. Portugal had to experience this "other" from afar. Knowledge of the other was indirect, something we heard of. According to Lourenço, this ancient Portuguese hyper-identity is also at the root of a certain European universality, precisely because of that looking in the distance. It is also something of the past. European integration brought otherness to proximity...that multicultural otherness that America knows so well. As he states "in less than 30 years, the view that Europe has of Portugal and Spain and our view of Europe has changed radically."

Lourenço finishes with a cautious note, writing: "It would be good that we, Portuguese and Spaniards, that were for centuries in and out of the space where the idea of universality was played, as if the idea of singularity should be sacrificed, continue to remember what our most brilliant cultural minds lived as a desert crossing. Our "new identity" inside Europe cannot do without this experience. It is a part of our memory and we are a part of it."