Indigenous Religions

Thomas Aquinas’s Body-Soul Dualism And The Hierarchy Of Human Dignity In Brazil – Theological Origins Of A Nation’s Self-Understanding, Part 2 (Vinicius Marinho)

The following is the second of a three-part series. The first can be found here.

The Ecclesial Endeavor to Define the Brazilian Soul: a Summa of the Colonial Church’s Roman Structure and Thomist-Scholastic Doctrine

Sicut videmus quod in uno homine est una anima et unum corpus, et tamen sunt diversa membra ipsius; ita Ecclesia Catholica est unum corpus, et habet diversa membra.[1]

The colonial Church asserted one unified body which is nevertheless dismembered and hierarchical. The Body was Roman in structure and Thomistic-Scholastic in doctrine. Thomist commentators laid the cornerstones of traditional Catholicism in Brazil with two expressions of the Scholastic faith.[2] For example, the bedrock of the Jesuitical pedagogical rule, the Ratio Studiorum, drew from Thomas’s unitas ordinis to commend prudence and obedience for corporate cohesion under one head. Thomas compared the corpus Ecclesiae to the human body and outlined a sacramental view of Church.

The head rules all members, like the soul commands the body.[3] Two constructs involving supernatural authority feed the hierarchy. The first is the sacra potestas; the second is the mater et magistra attitude. The Clergy’s “sacred power” supports the Church’s “mother and teacher” attitude, which gives an aura of legitimacy to the former. These notions maintain the traditional Church separated from the Church of the Poor.

Leonardo Boff’s ecclesiology springs from his experience living in self-organized poor communities.[4] During the highpoint of the liberation movement, Brazil had seventy thousands Comunidades Eclesiais de Base (CEB).[5] Today, their members still meet twice a week to reflect on their experience in light of the scriptures. These CEBs operate horizontally. Everybody has the right to direct and equal participation in the spiritual-political organization. People share responsibilities and mobilize for the common good, making CEBs critical and cooperative laboratories.

Boff argues that the CEBs are a new model of communitas fidelis because they embody a more genuine way of being koinonia fidelis.[6] They exemplify the “re-born” church, endowed with a fraternal and solidary[7] spirit that inspires the fight for life.[8] Boff reaches this conclusion by comparing the CEBs and early Christian communities.[9] The poor communities incarnate in praxis the early Christian ideals of the communities that appear in the First Epistle of Clement,[10] including the Jewish emphasis on justice.[11]

Eschatologically considered, the CEBs are an instrument of God’s Reign in the World, proposes Boff. They endeavor to live up to the values of the Gospels. Based on this model, the Church’s purpose is to serve the world through justice, so realizing Jesus’s ipsissima intentio.[12] And the World is the topos of the Christian ideal. So, the Church is perforce in and of the World, which subordinates it entirely to Christ’s desideratum of liberation. In sum, the CEB model instantiates the communitas fidelis because it yields to the World and God’s plan for it: Reign > World > Church.

The Roman Church operates in another order. It acts as though it were the exclusive intermediary between the Reign and the World: Reign > Church > World.[13] It conceives of the Reign in abstract terms, severing God’s promises from human reality. Speaking ex cathedra, the Clergy arrogates the exclusive power to realize the Reign. For Boff, this model can easily self-identify with the Reign or the World. Depending on the convenience of the hour, the Church can become an historically apathetic institution or a mere instrument of power.

Brazilian colonial ecclesiology grew from two prominent Scholastic influences on the missions.[14] First, from 1500 to the 1550s, there was the Baroque school of Pedro da Fonseca and Francisco Suárez. The Council of Trent (1545–1563) and the arrival of the Society of Jesus in 1559 inaugurated another phase. This second phase’s most notable thinkers are the Jesuits da Nóbrega, Anchieta, and Vieira.[15] They drew substantially from the prominent Thomists[16] whose ideas became the heart of Scholasticism. As Justo González summarizes, Thomas’s ambition was to show the complementarity of philosophy and theology to a Church habituated to divorce epistemic worlds.[17] Possibly, the condemnation of the “Radical Aristotelians” has inaugurated the “Scholastic Church.”[18]

Between the 1560s and 1599, the Society of Jesus elaborated a pedagogical rule called Ratio Studiorum. It evinces how the Scholastic-Thomistic doctrine strengthened the hierarchical structure. Thomas is the greatest teacher of Ignacio de Loyola’s order. Loyola, who was a soldier, admired Thomas’s discipline, rigor, and doctrinal commitment.[19] The Jesuit Leonel Franca considers the Ratio a collection of norms and prescriptions compiled from two texts.[20] The first is the Delectu Opinionum, a large collection of propositions extracted from Thomas’s Summa. The second, Praxis et Ratio Studiorum, addressed the taught disciplines.[21] The Ratio became the educational bible of Brazil,[22] governing all educational institution and activities.[23] Its jurisprudential method (lectio, question, and repetitio)[24] continued to influence the culture well into the twentieth century.[25]

The Ratio used Thomas’s unitas ordinis to stipulate a hierarchical Church and society. Its key premise was Thomas’s conviction that the best form of government is absolutist.[26] It defines the political and ecclesial bodies hierarchically, by drawing analogies to the human body. In a “unity of order,” each member has a specific functionto match a specific nature. Everybody serves a hierarchy of ends for the good of Body.

Thomas thought of the Church as an order of visible means that ensure a bodily type of contact with Christ’s Passion.[27] Humanity needs God’s sacraments because we are embodied souls. The sacraments, which are mediated from above, define the Church.[28] After death, he speculates, there will be no sacramental need, but the “earthly” Church is hierarchical because human souls live in physical bodies.[29] The body and the Body are two signs of one hierarchy.

The Ratio reinforcedthis model of Church by forming prudent Christians who had to “freely submit” their memory, will, and intelligence to the political head.[30]Prudence was the highest Catholic virtue.[31] The ideal Catholic is ne in studiis sit curiosus nec temerarius, ne propriae opinionis tenax, and ought to serve those who are “naturally” superior.[32] The Thomist “unity of order” principle requires the curbing of freedoms and an absolute obedience to authority. Obedience is a manifest sign of prudence, which is key to corporate cohesion.

The Ratio documents the Thomism foundations of the colonial church. General ecclesial hierarchy, though, has even deeper roots in the notion of sacred power.

Bishops, as vicars and ambassadors of Christ, govern the particular churches… by their authority and sacred power… This power, which they personally exercise in Christ’s name, is… ultimately regulated by the supreme authority of the Church…[33]

Sacra Potestas is the principle of the supernatural origins of two episcopate powers.[34] It operates in two formal modalities called “orders” and “jurisdiction.” The power of orders validates sacramental acts and uses symbolic language. A sacrament is a divine sign which the canonical law defines as “orders.” Iuris diction is the power to tell the Word accurately and efficaciously. It operates under a linguistic logic. The Canon Law also considers it a divine sign.

The Incarnation is the fundament of sacra potestas. Following Thomas, the Canon Law establishes that there is no Church without the Sacraments and the Word. The sacramental and jurisdictional powers are in mutual relation because they convey the same substance—divine salvation. The Word makes its “supernatural” significance explicit in the sacramental formulas. And the sacraments give the Clergy’s iuris diction its material effects.[35] The Incarnation of the Word is ultimate source of sacra potestas, which form an indivisible corporate “reality” in the Canonical Law. God saves from above, through the sacraments and iuris diction, which are only conferrable to ordained persons.[36]

There is no salvation outside the Church… authority. Authority, “c’est un attribut attaché à la personne et originairement à la personne physique.[37] In Rome, auctoritas was the power to validate, make perfect, or augment the act by a person who was physically under the tutelage of the pater familia.[38] Authority demands a pyramidic structure. The Church is so pyramidic that local priests commonly referred to bishops as the Hierarquia.[39] The Hierarquia is a group of powerful bodies and persons, not offices. Everybody is expected to accept the authority of the superiors with good will because it is in the divine will. If the Christian dignity depends on the Church’s sacra potestas,[40] it is mediated from the higher ranks. For the validity of the sacraments obeys the personal transmission of power, from Christ to the Apostles, to the Pope, to the bishops.[41]

The Roman Church is partnering with the world powers to become a civitas Dei[42] since February 380, when Theodosius declared Christianity the official religion of Rome. This juridical-political elevation granted the Clergy an organizational role in the Empire. The defining traits of the early communities, like mysterium, ordo, plebs, and ecclesia, became legal institutes. Tertullian wrote that the Christian fides became regula fides.[43] Conversion became a mere transference of cultural norms. Rites, prayers, and icons would simply replace their pagan “counterparts.”[44] Augustine thought the Christian faith was concealed in “pagan” practices, mutata sunt sacramenta, sed non fides.[45]

A “maternal and condescending” (mater et magistra) attitude helps the Church maintain an aura of supernatural authority:

To her was entrusted by her holy Founder the twofold task of giving life to her children and of teaching them and guiding them—both as individuals and as nations—with maternal care.[46]

 The Church claims the exclusive custody and infallible knowledge of Revelation. The power to tell what is sacred comes from that which is par excellence sacred. To create a supernatural environment, the Church isolates the Sacred into the supernatural and claims full dominium over it. Then Word becomes dogma and the Law becomes canon, explains Boff. By so doing, the Church’s word on the Sacred appears eternal, universal, and exclusive. A small group of “learned” theologians and lawyers is entrusted to assist the Clergy in examining the substance of tradition and the Scriptures. Ordinary people are simply to absorb their dogmatism.

So the encyclicals tell that the Apostles themselves established “bishops as their successors, handing over to them the authority to teach.”[47] Thomas believes the pope is the sole legitimate succedent of Peter.[48] The Pastor aeternus is directly invested in the supernatural apostolic authority,[49] which should suffice to affirm the papal infallibility. But there is more. The Church also claims the Holy Trinity has personally founded it.[50] God established the Church in Christ, who gave the Apostles[51] the power of iuris diction, which they utilize with the inspiration of the Spirit. Supernatural authority allegedly guards the irrefutability of the Clergy against critical reflection on the human reality.[52] The Magisterium of the Church rests on such assumptions.

The Revelation of the Roman-Scholastic Church is that God wills for humans to live hierarchically, with varied degrees of dignity. The Church elevates the internal and external hierarchy to the status of divine will.[53] If Christ has personally established a hierarchical Body for humanity, God must have intended for humans to live hierarchically. Boff argues this hierarchical Christianity “Internalizou-se na alma popular[54] of Brazil. It now belongs in the established order. The sacra potestas and mater et magistra enable the Church to refine this draconian assumption to a significant level of self-coherence.

All the while, the hierarchy oppresses the most socially vulnerable[55] and precludes a genuine encounter with the poor. The “evangelization” project has failed crassly because the colonial evangelizers were landgrabbers and slaveowners.[56] So the oppressed had to develop their own model of being Church, namely, the CEB. The more the Church suppresses the socially lowered, the more dismembered and hierarchical it is. No other institution speaks of dignitas more recurrently than the Catholic Church. And yet, it denies the sacrament of ordination to women and tries to control their bodies. It does not allow the historically oppressed “be” the Church.[57]

The Roman structure and the Scholastic-Thomistic doctrine are complementary.[58] The Church helped the empire with indoctrination and the Crown financed the Church hierarchy. Scholastic Catholicism was the principal ideology of the colonial project. Today, the hierarchical model remains finely attuned to authoritarian regimes.[59]

The Racial Endeavor to Define the Brazilian Soul: the Racial Democracy Myth and Gilberto Freyre’s Anti-Thomistic Sentiment

The first “official history” of Brazil has become a myth. It describes how a people originated from harmonious racial mixtures. The racial democracy myth is theological insofar as it narrates the birth and destiny of a modern, multicultural, and progressive people. The story unites and erases differences for the common good, elevating Brazil to an exemplar among democratic nations. Being so racially mixed, the myth says, Brazilians have never experienced racial injustice. There is no structural racism in a land known for hybridity or miscegenation—Brazil’s defining virtue. But the narrative which unites the nation with cultural and political wonders also camouflages a people’s violentorigins and present.[60]

The arrival of the Portuguese Crown in Rio de Janeiro, 1808, initiated a political transformation.[61] The process leading to independence in 1822 was at once “conservative and revolutionary.” It maintained the colonial rule but opened some space for a moderate distribution of power. Brazil was becoming a hybrid monarchical and republican system, a “colonial nation.”[62]

The agrarian aristocratic elite envisioned a modern nation with an absolutist government. It began advocating for a national political-economy to increase production and reduce international competition.[63] The Brazilian bourgeoisie, too, wished to incorporate the liberal values into the colonial structure. It wanted “freedom” for the political-economy and colonial rule for the people.[64] Brazil’s national project grew in a slaveholding and patronizing culture. It was hierarchical for the poor and colored and “progressive” for the rich and white.[65] But the highly fragmented society lacked a national culture.

The king of Brazil sought to maintain his centralized power by attending positively to the new demands[66] and uniting the aristocracy, a wannabe bourgeoisie, and a multitude of freed people, peasants, and rural workers. To that end, he launched a few institutions. The Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro (IHGB) is one of them. Its purpose was to develop anofficialhistory of Brazil. A convincing narrative of common origins could bring the classes together, minimize social conflict, and justify the centralization of a constitutional monarchy.

The IHGB then issued a public contest of essays on the question “How Should One Describe the History of Brazil?” The founder of Brazilian history and essay winner was the German botanist Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius.[67] Von Martius, who was anything but a historian, had written treatises on vegetal morphology. His winning story harmonized the tropical nature with the “progress” of racial mixture.[68] It integrates the races but acknowledges the Portuguese predominance.[69] From his perspective, the Portuguese men are clearly the conquerors and lords of the land. Von Martius painted a fluvial metaphor of Brazil’s racial birth. The races met to form one wide and rapid river with two tributaries. Each river represents a race. Unsurprisingly, the greatest river is the “white” or Portuguese. It “cleans” and “absorbs” the Indigenous and the African rivers.

The first official history of Brazil is a narrative of racial mixture for the purposes of national unity. Essentially it says that the races belong together for the greatness of the white race, which predominates[70] in a “hierarquia inquestionável.”[71] Von Martius’s naturalist spirit kept returning in nationalist stories that used race to affirm unity.[72]

But it was Gilberto Freyre’s racial democracy that canonized the myth. His Casa-Grande & Senzala (1933) has convinced Brazilians that racial mixture is their most defining characteristic and virtue. Freyre’s alluring history is the first scholarly work to acknowledge that Africans actively participated in the formation of Brazilian culture. Yet it suggests that the African and Indigenous contributions are primarily biological, i.e.,sexual and “genetic.” Culture is “natural” for Freyre to the extent that the economy and the family are the loci of the human creative interactions. “Nature” so understood linked the aristocratic, monopolist, monocultural, and slaveholding economy and the patriarchal family.

For Freyre, the patriarchal family generated Brazil’s private and public institutes in the reality of slavery and monoculture. Casa-Grande & Senzala is a complex study, filled with contradictions and insights, but it plainly claims that the family and production were the powerhouses of Brazil’s self-understanding.[73] Freyre’s thesis is in the subtitle of the Brazilian edition, “A Study in the Formation of the Brazilian Family Under the Patriarchal Economy.”

In Freyre’s account, the contributions of African people to Brazilian culture happened via sexual relations with the slave master. Though he considers the Portuguese “inferior” to the “sophisticated and knowledgeable” Western and Central African, the Portuguese “exceeded” them in “military and technical” accomplishments.[74] Africans were “superior” in religion, aesthetics, “genetics,” and culture. Yet, despite their “victory” the Portuguese had to negotiate “genetic and social” changes. The scarcity of white women was for Freyre the major reason for this. He argues that it created “celebratory zones” between the white male “winner” and the colored female “loser.”

To be sure, Freyre acknowledges the violence and degradation of Brazilian miscegenation.[75] Regardless, he thinks the violent “celebratory zones” created a democratic nation by racially bridging the big house and the slaves quarters.[76] Because of them, “Every Brazilian… carries in his soul, if not in the soul and the body, the shadow or at least the birthmark of the Indigenous and the Black peoples.”[77]

For Freyre, the slave master “owned” the land, the women, and the houses—which they built hefty, sturdy, and ugly, all bathed in whale oil.[78] This Portuguese male also “overcame” the Church, claims Freyre. That happened, in part, because the colonial Church was Jesuitical.

Freyre had a distaste for the Thomist inflexibility of the Jesuits. He thought the Jesuit rigidity did not fit in Brazil. The Franciscans, he imagines, would have been the ideal missionaries for an “intellectually rebellious” people with strong “communist tendencies.” Franciscans were better for the Native and the African because they opposed intellectualism and “mercantilism,” loved simplicity, and were almost “animist and totemist” in regards to Nature.[79] They detested the Jesuitical mnemonic and abstract instructions but loved the Franciscan disinterestedness.[80]

The myth tells Brazilians they have never seen white supremacy. Brazil is a blending machine that loves and feeds on difference. It thus has something to teach the world about progress. Though the myth may disclose a noble ideal, it assumes a grave fallacy—that Brazilians are not racist. Brazil has never been a democracy, much less so a racial one. Despite the pointed efforts by the Black Movement to unmask the myth, it has convinced too many that no one is racist where everybody is mixed. Colonization and slavery have naturalized institutes of dominium which a redemptive tale alone cannot erase. The caravels were not cruise ships, the big houses not love nests, and Brazil not a racial wonderland. A myth cannot bridge the dignity gap.[81]

The Biblical Person Made in Relation, Self-Transcendence, and Love

This section presents a definition of personhood by contrasting two Christian views that are prominent in Brazilian culture. The first view is Biblical. In it, humans are relational beings, i.e., hearers of God, and capable of overcoming social limitations through the attitude of love. The second view is Thomist. It places the soul above the body and the “disembodied” life above the embodied one. Together, the two views suggest that persons exist as value units within hierarchical relations. Since people exist to one another in hierarchical ways, their dignity is quantifiable. And there are degrees of dignity because the soul is superior to the body.

Ivone Gebara, a Brazilian eco-feminist theologian, departs from her experience living with poor women in Camaragibe, Brazil, to reflect on the concrete impacts of the Aristotelian-Thomistic essentialism. Women have been unjustifiably associated with the idea of “nature,” through the “wild” and the “nurturing” stereotypes. She thinks the problem is that theological constructs sown on fundamentally naturalist soil can affirm the superiority of men over women and the human dominium over creation.

For Gebara, the “white, westernized, wealthy man, the possessor of economic and political power is regarded as a person on the account of his relationship of superiority.”[82]He continues to place God above creation and reserve to himself the reflection of the divine image.[83] For the same reason, Indigenous and Black Brazilians are under attack.[84] While everyone is naturally prone to favor their own experiences, theologians most often present their fragmented perceptions as though they were absolute.[85]

Personhood is not subject to philosophical speculation, Gebara warns. Every person is unique and complex. Unique, because their relationships are particular. Complex, because their personas are multiple.[86] For Gebara, the personas are the various roles everybody plays in the network of relationships. Since all human bonds are specific, the personas that they design are too.

Gebara defines the nature of the undefinable human existence with an imprecise word: “relatedness.” The actual person isa person on account of real relationships. Relatedness is the dynamic web of relations that constitute a person. The paradox—to define the undefinable—is unavoidable because actual relationships are contingent and they make personas. But “relatedness” makes actual persons, not the person as such. And still, Gebara proposes that “relatedness is the primary reality,”[87] so it is also the nature of the actual person. In relationships of command and obedience, there can only be superior and inferior persons.

Leonardo Boff takes a biblical shortcut to reach a nearby destination. The Bible confirms the “relatedness” thesis but grounds it in the divine address to humanity. Boff believes the human-divine interaction is always personal and dialogical. Humans are basically hearers of and respondents to God, he proposes. The hearing and responding vocations indicate that the person exists in a dialect between “immanence and transcendence.”

 The Bible speaks of this dialect in terms of body and soul. It calls “body” our spatial-temporal limitations and “soul” the human outward predisposition to overcome limitations through interaction with God, the other, and the planet. The person, Boff summarizes, is the unity of these two dimensions—a body-soul, Paul would say.[88] The immanent or corporeal aspect represents our temporarily and spatial constrains.[89] Life is fragmented. The soul or transcendental aspect represents the inclination and power overcome social limitations through interaction. Transcendence implies agency and openness. Body and soul form a non-oppositional dialect because they constitute one indivisible person. A person exists in the dialogical communion with the other and the body-soul dialect.

While the Bible does affirm the imago dei, the dignity of the respondent is not dependent on the divine reflection but on the hearing and responding capacities.[90] If the divine reflection discloses the sacredness of the person, human interactions constitute a precondition of that image. Our divine image depends on the inherit capacity to hear and respond to the other. And being a hearer implies having the power to respond and the purpose to do so with dignity. God’s commandment to love defines the human transcendence and gives a purpose. As Boff proposes, the human purpose is the actualization of all possibilities contained in relationships.[91]

Boff synthetizes his concept by saying that humans are “more relationship than being”[92] and an “infinite project.”[93] Being “hearers of God’s Word”[94] makes us a creative and open-ended process. The person who hears and responds is naturally utopic.[95] We inevitably dream of that which is necessary for a fuller existence. “God” is the horizon toward which the religious look in search for plenitude, posits Boff. Encountering this horizon in the human other is just natural because “Love is as strong as death.”

Love is the primeval capacity to enter dialogical and potentially transcending relations. For Boff, Jesus is the ideal person because he has given the socially lowered a perfect love response. The Incarnation is for Boff an instantiation of the transcending possibilities that exist immanently for everybody. By loving and accepting the poor’s love, a person discovers human nature, Boff proposes.[96] Because his person is inseparable from his love response, Jesus’s humanity is the source of his divinity too.[97] His divinity is in his human capacity to reach the fullness of agapeic love.

Vinicius Marinho is a PhD student at the University of Chicago. He specializes in economic and racial inequality, production, liberation theology, and critical legal studies.
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[1] Aquinas, Expositio in Symbolum Apostolorum, 9.

[2] Celso Luiz Ludwig, “El Pensamiento Filosófico Brasileño de los Siglos XVI al XVIII,”in El Pensamiento Filosófico Latinoamericano del Carive y ‘Latino,’ 1300–2000, Enrique Dussel et al. (Cuidade del Mexico, Mexico: Siglo XXI, 2011),115–22.

[3] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1.2.138.2.3; 3.8.1.2; Expositio in Symbolum Apostolorum, 10; Commentary on Colossians, 1.1.2.4; Commentary on Ephesus, 4.1.5.

[4] Leonardo Boff, Igreja: Carisma e Poder (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Record: 2005); Eclesiogênese: A Reinvenção da Igreja (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Record, 2008).

[5] Boff, Eclesiogênese 18; CNBB, Confederação Nacional dos Bispos Brasileiros, “Mensagem De Deus Sobre As Comunidades Eclesiais De Base,” 2010, https://www.cnbb.org.br/mensagem-ao-povo-de-deus-sobre-as-comunidades-eclesiais-de-base/.

[6] Boff, Igreja,261.

[7] Boff, Eclesiogênese, 87–88.

[8] Ibid., 61–71; 96.

[9] Boff, Igreja, 258.

[10] Ibid., 171.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid., 25.

[13] Ibid., 29.

[14] John Lynch, New Worlds: A Religious History of Latin America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).

[15] Ludwig, “El Pensamiento Filosófico Brasileño,” 115-122.

[16] Suárez, de Soto, Sepúlveda, de Mercado, Botero, Vazquez, and Magnus.

[17] Justo L. González, The Story of Christianity: The Early Church to the Dawn of the Reformation vol 1. (New York: Harper One, 2010), 378–79, 433.

[18] According to McGinn, Thomas Aquinas’s, 121 ff.

[19] Ibid.,154.

[20] Ibid.

[21] José Sebastião da Silva Dias, “Portugal e a Cultura Européia (Séculos XVI a XVIII)” in Biblos vol. 28(Lisbon, Portugal: 1953), 382.

[22] Manuela Carneiro da Cunha, “Imagens de Índios do Brasil: O Século XVI.” Estudos Avançados 4 no. 10 (1990): 91–119.

[23] Leonel Franca, O Método Pedagógico dos Jesuítas (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Agir, 1952), 43.

[24] João Adolfo Hansen “Ratio Studiorum e Política Católica Ibérica no Século XVII” in Brazil 500 Anos, 32.

[25] Fernando Azevedo, A Cultura Brasileira: Introdução ao Estudo da Cultura do Brasil 3rd ed. (São Paulo, Brazil: Melhoramentos, 1958),517.

[26] Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, 4.76.

[27] Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 3.61.1.1.3.

[28] Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles 4.76

[29] Aquinas, Quaestiones Quodlibetales,1;Congar, Thomas d’Aquin: Sa Vision de Théologie et de l’Eglise (London, England: Variorum Reprints, 1985), 108.

[30] Francisco Suárez, Defesa de La Fé Católica y Apostolica Contra los Errores del Aglicanismo vol. 4 (Madrid, Spain: Instituto de Estudios Politicos, 1970), 3.4.

[31] Hansen, “Ratio Studiorum,” 35–40.

[32] Ibid, 15.

[33] My emphasis. Lumen Gentium,papal encyclical of Paul VI (November 21, 1964), 27. https://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_19641121_lumen-gentium_en.html

[34] Eugenio Corecco and Libero Gerosa, Il Diritto Della Chiesa (Vatican: Jaca/Amateca, 1995); Libero Gerosa, Canon Law (Münster, Germany: Lit. Verlag/Amateca, 2002), 183-4.

[35] Ibid.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Pierre Noailles, Fas et Ius: Études de Droit Romain (Paris, France: Les Belles Lettres, 1948), 274.

[38] Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin, 2006), 91; Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 75–76, 80.

[39] Boff, Igreja,29.

[40] Corecco, “Natura e Struttura.”

[41] Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles 4.76.

[42] Boff, América Latina,27, 125.

[43] Tertullian, De Praescriptione Haereticorum, 24.1; 198.

[44] Boff, Igreja.

[45] Augustine, Sermones 10, 19.

[46] My emphasis. Mater et Magistra, 10,  http://www.vatican.va/content/john-xxiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_j-xxiii_enc_15051961_mater.html.

[47] Dei Verbum, 7.

[48] Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, 4.76.

[49] Vatican I, Pastor Aeternus, Pope Pius IX (July 1, 1870), http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/i-vatican-council/documents/vat-i_const_18700718_pastor-aeternus_la.html

[50] Aquinas, Expositio in Symbolum Apostolorum, 9.

[51] Dei Verbum.

[52] Boff, Igreja, 29.

[53] Boff, América Latina: Da Conquista à Nova Evangelização (São Paulo, Brazil: Ática, 1992), 186.

[54] Ibid., 125.

[55] Boff, Igreja, 178.

[56] Boff, América Latina, 119.

[57] Boff, Igreja, 88–89.

[58] Rioland Azzi, A Cristandade Colonial: Um Projeto Autoritário vol. 1(São Paulo, Brazil: Paulinas, 1989), 227–29.

[59] Marilena Chauí,“Sociedade Brasileira: Violência e Autoritarismo por Todos os Lados” Carta Maior February 26, 2016,https://www.cartamaior.com.br/?/Editoria/Politica/Sociedade-brasileira-violencia-e-autoritarismo-por-todos-os-lados/4/35548); Boff, Igreja, 30.

[60] Abdias Nascimento, O Genocídio do Negro Brasileiro Processo de um Racismo Mascarado (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Ipeafro, 2016); Luiza Bairros, “Lembrando Lelia Gonzalez” in Jurema Werneck et al., O Livro da Saúde das Mulheres Negras (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Pallas, 2000); Silvio Almeida, Racismo Estrutural (São Paulo, Brazil: Pólen, 2019).

[61] Cândido, “A Sociologia no Brasil,” 271–301.

[62] Florestan Fernandes, A Revolução Burguesa no Brasil­: Ensaio de Interpretação Sociológica 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: Zahar, 1976), 32–33.

[63] Ibid., 33.

[64] Fernandes, A Revolução Burguesa, 31–33.

[65] Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Depois do Colonialismo Mental: Repensar e Reorganizar o Brasil (São Paulo, Brazil: Autonomia Literária, 2008).

[66] Fernandes, A Revolução Burguesa, 31.

[67]Como Se Deve Escrever a História do Brasil,” Jornal do Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro 24 no. 6 (Jan. 1845): 381–403, https://umhistoriador.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/martius-carl-friedrich_como-se-deve-escrever-a-histc3b3ria-do-brasil.pdf

[68] Chauí, Brasil, 31.

[69] Schwartz, Sobre o Autoritarismo Brasileiro, 21–22.

[70] von Martius, “Como Se Deve.”

[71] Ibid.

[72] For example, Euclides da Cunha’s Os Sertões (1902), Mário de Andrade’s Macunaíma (1928), and Oliveira Viana’s Raça e Assimilação (1932).

[73] Cândido, “A Sociologia no Brasil.”

[74] Freyre, Casa-Grande & Senzala: Formação da Família Brasileira sob o Regime da Economia Patriarcal 48th ed. (São Paulo, Brazil: Global, 2003), preface, 33.

[75] Freyre, Casa-Grande & Senzala, 515.

[76] Jessé Souza, “Gilberto Freyre e a Singularidade Cultural Brasileira” Tempo Social 12:1 (2000): 69–70

[77] Freyre, Casa-Grande & Senzala, 367; preface, 44.

[78] Ibid.

[79] Ibid.,214–15.

[80] Ibid.

[81] Marilena Chauí, “500 Anos: Cultura e Política no Brasil,” Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais, 38 (1993): 51–52l.

[82] Ivone Gebara, Longing for Running Water: Ecofeminism and Liberation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1999), 75.

[83] Ibid., 16; Michelle A. Gonzalez, Created in God’s Image: An Introduction to Feminist Theological Anthropology (New York: Orbis, 2007).

[84] Gebara, Longing, 16.

[85] Ibid, 70.

[86] Ibid., 77.

[87] Ibid., 83; 84–85; 90.

[88] Leonardo Boff, O Destino do Homem e do Mundo 11th ed. (Petrópolis, Brazil: Vozes), 64.

[89] Leonardo Boff, A Ressurreição de Cristo: A Nossa Ressurreição na Morte 7 th ed. (Petrópolis, Brazil: Vozes, 1986), 81–86; c.

[90] Ibid.

[91] Boff, Tempo de Transcendência.

[92] Leonardo Boff, O Destino, 62; Boff, Jesus Cristo Libertador: Ensaio de Cristologia Crítica Para o Nosso Tempo, 19th ed. (Petrópolis, Brazil: Vozes, 2008), 186; Boff, Tempo de Transcendência, 36.

[93] Boff, Tempo, 37.

[94] Boff, O Destino, 62.

[95] Boff, A Ressurreição, 61.

[96] Boff, Jesus Cristo Libertador, 186.

[97] Leonardo Boff, “Images of Jesus in Brazilian Liberal Christianity” in Faces of Jesus: Latin American Christologies, ed. Miguez Bonino (Eugene, OR, Wipf and Stock, 2002), 24–25.

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