Henrique Cláudio de Lima Vaz, S.J., was born in Ouro Preto (Minas Gerais) on 24 August 1921 and died in Belo Horizonte on 23 May 2002. He entered the Society of Jesus in 1938, studied philosophy at the Jesuit scholasticate in Nova Friburgo and, from 1945, in Rome, where he earned a licentiate at the Pontifical Gregorian University; he was ordained a priest in 1948 and took his doctorate in philosophy at the same institution in 1953, with a thesis on dialectic and contemplation in Plato. He is regarded as one of the most important Brazilian philosophers of the twentieth century for the systematic reach of his work.

Career

He taught at the Jesuit philosophy faculties of Nova Friburgo (1953–1963), São Paulo (1963–1974), Rio de Janeiro (1975–1981), and Belo Horizonte (1982–2002), and was a professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais from 1964 to 1986, becoming professor emeritus in 2001. In the 1960s he served as an adviser to the Catholic University Youth (JUC) and the Popular Action (Ação Popular) movement, which sought to reconcile Christian faith and social engagement; in that period his articles also offered a critical analysis of Marx. In his mature work he devoted himself to building a philosophical system articulated in three large blocks: metaphysics and the history of philosophy, philosophical anthropology, and ethics.

Key Concepts

  • Philosophical anthropology — in Antropologia Filosófica I (1991) and II (1992), Lima Vaz sets out the history of conceptions of the human being in the West and proposes a systematics of the structure of the human, articulated in categories of structure (lived body, psyche, and spirit), relation (objectivity, intersubjectivity, and transcendence), and unity (realization).
  • Philosophical ethics — in Introdução à Ética Filosófica (I, 1999; II, 2000), he reconstructs the Western ethical tradition from Greece to modernity and argues that ethics is grounded in a conception of the human being and of human destiny, in contrast with what he describes as the metaphysical emptying of modern ethics.
  • Relation of transcendence — in Lima Vaz’s anthropology, the openness of spirit to the Absolute, which completes the relations of objectivity and intersubjectivity and in which human fulfillment is realized.
  • Critique of modernity — in Raízes da Modernidade (2002), published in the year of his death, he examines the intellectual origins of the modern world and the difficulties of grounding ethical and metaphysical thought in modernity.

Influenced by

  • Plato, the subject of his doctoral thesis
  • Thomas Aquinas, the principal reference of his metaphysics
  • Hegel, who informs his reading of history and dialectic
  • Joseph Maréchal, from whom he inherits the tradition of transcendental Thomism
  • Augustine, whose maxim on faith and reason he often recalls

Influenced

  • Generations of professors and researchers trained at UFMG and the Jesuit faculties, who made Belo Horizonte a center for the study of metaphysics, anthropology, and ethics
  • The Catholic youth and social-action movements of the 1960s, of which he was an interlocutor
  • Brazilian debates on the foundation of ethics and the philosophy of culture

Works

Ontologia e História (1968); Escritos de Filosofia I–VII (1986–2002); Antropologia Filosófica I (1991) and II (1992); Introdução à Ética Filosófica I (1999) and II (2000); Experiência Mística e Filosofia na Tradição Ocidental (2000); Ética e Direito (2002); Raízes da Modernidade (2002).

See also

Thomas Aquinas, Mário Ferreira dos Santos, Miguel Reale, Francisco Suárez