Jesus, Whitman, and Tolstoy are presented here above all as traces of an intellectual, existential, and spiritual lineage that helps to understand the work of the Portuguese writer as one of the most interesting manifestations of this lineage. I call it spiritual democracy, and despite its inevitable transience as a concept, it is one that we can profitably draw upon in our time.

Regardless of its fate, the idea of spiritual democracy is not limited to Saramago's hermeneutics, as it contains a descriptive potential and a theoretical elasticity that profitably extends the idea to the hermeneutics of culture itself. In this sense, I hope that it can serve as a living and dynamic instrument of knowledge for literary and cultural analysts who consider spirituality, particularly the secular spirituality I advocate, as a unifying element of the world's pains and joys and its artistic representations.

Manuel Frias Martins

| José Saramago Foundation / Paperback / 141 pp. / 140 x 210 x 10 mm |