antÔnio vieira and the awareness of the play: the rectoric and ontological worlds in the baroque period genesis

Taking as a starting point some excerpts from the Sermão da Sexagésima, by Fr. António Vieira, this paper investigates what role the development of rhetoric in the Baroque period might have played in the articulation of a new language pattern, always about to dismantle substancialist views about the world. Based upon some unexpected parallels, as the sole names of Homer, Pindar and Torquato Tasso may suggest, it is argued that the tension between rhetorical world and ontological world is so decisive for understanding Baroque as the tension between the earthly and the divine.