Coimbra Psychology in Brazilian Land

The Coimbra Jesuit Course treaties were part of the baggage brought to Brazil by the Jesuit missionaries who came from 1549 in the new Portuguese colony, then called Terra de Santa Cruz (Land of the Holy Cross). The Jesuits acted in Brazil in the long period beginning in 1549 and ending in 1760 with the expulsion by decree of the Portuguese Minister Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo. The mission of the Jesuits was to catechise the indigenous people and to assist the Christian settlers. They pushed the mixture in the perspective of what they understood as the Christian social body of the Colony, where all social and racial components were inserted and united by a vision of the Christian world. For these purposes, education and the establishment of schools for the study of the children of Indians and Portuguese settlers has become one of the main instruments. Knowledge of the human otherness they encountered was also fundamental. The worldview and social practices of the natives who populated the Brazilian territory, belonging to different ethnicities, were immensely different from the cultural models and social modes of the religious coming from Europe. For this, they needed criteria to guide the process of knowing this new anthropological reality. At the same time, life in the new worlds implied a profound revision of one's own way of being, of the habits and the ordinary resources learned in their socio-cultural tradition of origin. So, the Jesuits used the psychological knowledge of their own cultural universe (Massimi 2021a) not only for the knowledge of themselves, but also for the understanding of the Indians with whom they lived. This was particularly challenging given the anthropological and cultural diversity between the world of missionaries and that of natives. The Jesuits will try to understand the Indians from the cultural categories provided by their world of origin, the same applied to the knowledge of their own experience. The use of these categories before the other is guided by the observation of behavioural signs. In this effort, they contributed to the constitution of knowledge and practices aimed at the knowledge and care of the person according to the demands of individual and social life. The knowledge of the scientia de anima elaborated in the Coimbra Jesuit Course treaties has received my attention, and this article must be read taking into consideration at I have written there (Massimi 2021a)