O "jogo de espelhos": religião, poder e sacralidade no romance "Memorial do Convento"/The "game of mirrors": religion, power and sacredness in novel "Memorial do Convento"

When the more insightful reader takes a careful look at the details of a literary work, he realizes mechanisms that govern and organize the text with specifics goals for the arrangement of the narrative. In the novel "Memorial do Convento", by José Saramago, the relationship between literature and religion is one of such mechanisms, which becomes visible in the confrontation between sacred and profane, as well as in the reversal of their values and in the affinity between "spiritual power" and "temporal power", resembling what Giacomo Marramao has defined as "game of mirrors", i.e. the "nationalization" of the Church and the "ecclesiastization" of the State. The present text aims to investigate the status of the sacred and the relationship between the Church and the Portuguese court in the 18th century, analyzing its implications in the literary narrative. This article is part of the current movement that Umberto Eco called "the come back to religious thought", one frenetic regress to everything that reports to the sacred, somewhat that is in the countercurrent of Enlightenment scientism, explicitly bringing back the "question of God" to literature. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]