Social Compass

Enlightenment thinkers dealt with Islam in two ways. Contemporaries living in Muslim countries recounted, according to their religious orientations (Anglican, Calvinist, Lutheran, liberal Catholic, Jansenist or Salesian), what they believed to have seen or understood. Their information was often superficial, especially in the area of theology, but globally they developed the corpus of texts which subsequently served the growth of orientalism. Theoreticians remaining in Europe essentially hoped to deconstruct the devout testimony of the preceding century. Islam was for them a simple pretext within a wider polemical context. This said, attitudes remained ambiguous due to the coexistence of forms of de-demonization and demonization of Islam; neutral attitudes were the exception rather than the rule.

The Enlightenment reached the Orthodox world subjugated by the Turks in the middle of the 18th century, principally through the teaching of Eugenios Voulgaris. Supported by a new and dynamic class of merchants and sailors whose teachers had trained in European universities, towards the end of the century the new ideas and sciences had conquered practically the entire educational system, breathing fresh air into education, until then in the Church's hands. The neo-Aristotelian “Corydalian system” of higher education, established for over a century, was certainly shaken, but the new knowledge did not seem to threaten the dogmas of Orthodox faith. Yet certain ecclesiastical and phanarict milieux proved hostile to the large-scale introduction of these “innovations”. The reaction was much stronger after 1792, for obvious reasons.

Accompanying the advance of absolutism, in the 18th century a major cultural mutation took place which we call by the convenient term “Enlightenment”. In Latin America it is more a question of a group of mutations in the domain of ideas, imagination, values and behaviour of an extraordinary complexity throughout the century, whose rhythms and geographies are multiple. We shall try to underline an essential aspect of this mutation, which can be considered to be at the heart of a new reference system: the victory of the individual, considered as the supreme value and reference criterion by which institutions as well as behaviours should be measured. Unlike in the Anglo-Saxon north where modernity found a place in harmony with religious culture, in Latin America modernity was forged in opposition to Catholic culture—hence the attempt to propagate a religious culture in elective affinity with liberal modernity. In examining the causes of the diffusion of Protestant societies in the mid-19th century, in measuring the density and implantation of these religious sociabilities, we need to understand the formation of this new social and political actor, the bearer of a project of democratic modernity, and grasp the bases of this cultural mutation.

This article attempts to shed light on the linguistic techniques at work in accounts of divine healing in a Brazilian Pentecostal Church of the “third wave”: the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. The principal part of the text is devoted to speech analysis. Based upon a study of these techniques, it is possible to formulate the hypothesis that the discourse of “divine healing” constructs a universe of verisimilitude inaugurated in a pre-accomplished rupture. This rupture results from a mirroring relationship between conversion and healing, a relationship proper to the functioning of theological discourse. But the discourse of divine healing is also a discursive machine succeeding through the incessant repetition of the same transformational account, as well as by its mode of absorption of scientific (biomedical) language. One may conclude that in adopting a singular syntax based on simplification, “phagocytation” and sudden rupture, the Pentecostal believer participates in the construction of a universe which will demand his obedience.