Fernando Pessoa on Not Thinking

Ramblings on a Neopagan Poet

When I was in seminary, one of my favorite poets was Fernando Pessoa. Pessoa was a Portuguese poet and literary critic in the early twentieth century. He was an extremely significant cultural force in Portugal, as well as simply being a profoundly interesting individual. Much of his writing happened under pen names, usually with a hint of irony; he has a particular interest today as one of the multifarious expressions of non-French existentialism (like, for example, Miguel de Unamuno), because he subverted modern assumptions about the singular and stable subject. “I contain multitudes” Pessoa famously said—and all of these multitudes wrote. When one studies Pessoa’s writings, one finds something almost like the Kierkegaardian ressourcement of the Socratic mask—but one has the distinct feeling that instead of a mask, it is Pessoa himself who he is putting on and taking off, Pessoa himself who is fragmented in this way.

But there is more to Pessoa than simply his existential-adjacent, subversive self-repetition and creation. Pessoa was a mystical writer. His approach was distinctly reliant on a fundamental intuition about reality, based as it was on a layered view of reality, which he learned from English Theosophy. Pessoa was a notable translator of the writings of English theosophists, for example, Helena Blavatsky. And while he did this translating project, he ended up having metaphysical experiences of his own. He would often attend spiritualist gatherings, and he experimented in automatic writing, claimed to have astral visions, made astrological predictions, and was deeply interested in hermeticism and alchemy. His writings were important especially for the neopaganist movements in Portugal; though of course, Pessoa argued that there was nothing ‘new’ about this movement back towards the earth.

In 2020, just before I was about to go on vicarage, Margaret Jull Costa and Patricio Ferrari published their translation of one of Pessoa’s most neopagan personas, Alberto Caeiro, side by side with the original Portuguese. I must confess: in the Penguin Classics edition of Pessoa’s writings, it was Caeiro that spoke the deepest to me; and so, I was thrilled to see this full edition come to the light of day. On vicarage, I promptly bought a copy for myself and one for my Portuguese roommate at the time, who loved Pessoa even more than I. I must have read the edition in a day, if not two. And then, I returned to it throughout the eight months or so that I was a vicar at the church there.

Part of what captured me about Pessoa/Caeiro was his simplicity of writing. Pessoa/Caeiro claims to be a simple shepherd, who writes more out of his ignorance of things than his learning. He challenges the reader to slow down, to look at things, and to see in them simply the things themselves. He challenges the reader not to look past things to their eternal referent, or into things to find something other than they are. In this sense, his poetry questions idealisms of any kind, be they religious or philosophical. In this personal, Pessoa becomes the champion of the everyday, of the finite, as I said before leading a movement back towards the earth. When he does theologize, he tries to do so “like the flowers”, which simply bloom and die, appreciating all things for what they are. Like Nietzsche, Pessoa/Caeiro urges us to affirm life as it is, without a transcendent or transcendental referent.

In his very first poem in the collection, he tells us that he is a shepherd: but not because he keeps sheep. In fact, he has never kept sheep in his life. But in a sense he is a shepherd, if by sheep you mean thoughts. For in his heart, his soul is a shepherd, which is completely reconciled to its environment. He is not wracked by strong emotions. He always notices everything. And in his heart, he feels a deep contentment, because he has confirmed himself to the natural state of things. Some things happen, and it is not for him to find a reason; he has no ambition, no desire. His ideas do not hold him captive; rather, like the stoics of old, he is still.

What kind of shepherd is this? A shepherd of the soul, who knows how to call a thing that which it is. He enjoys what there is to enjoy; he feels what he needs to feel. He is completely reconciled to his inner and outer environment; as such he does not need theology or philosophy, or other academic disciplines which distort the plain world around him. As he says in the second poem of the collection, “I have no philosophy; I have senses.”

“There’s metaphysics enough in not thinking about anything” he provocatively begins his fifth poem. The large metaphysical questions engaged in by scholastic philosophy are simply “shutting my eyes and not thinking”; real knowledge of things come from the irrepressible gravity of the objects of sensation. When one closes ones eyes to consider the sun, it becomes something else; but when one looks at the sun, one can think of nothing else; rather, subject and object coalesce. “What metaphysics do those trees have?” Pessoa/Caeiro asks—the best metaphysics, “namely not to know why they live/ or to know that they don’t know? ‘The inner substance of things’…/ ‘The inner meaning of the Universe’… All of this is false, all of it is meaningless./ […] the only inner meaning of things/ is that they have no inner meaning at all.”

Pessoa/Caeiro challenges all who would live the life of cognition: why, he asks, are you so out of sync with the world around you? Why do you think and think and think—but nature herself simply does. Consider flowers, he urges us. They do not think about blooming; they just bloom. Engaging in the spiritual exercise of not thinking—in some sense, an unphilosophy—what if this is the key to living holistically?

If the philosophers are misguided, the mystics have fared even worse. “Mystic poets are sick philosophers, / And philosophers are madmen.” Pessoa/Caeiro ridicules St. Francis especially throughout his poems. One should not, like St. Francis, anthropomorphize the sheer alterity of nature; streams and rivers, rocks and foxes are not brothers and sisters; rather, they are simply what they are. Instead, Pessoa/Caeiro claims to be only a “mystic of the body,” with a simple soul that does not think. He says that his mysticism is found in “not wanting to know./ It’s living and not thinking about it.” Nature for Pessoa must be sung, not understood.

Surprisingly, the ultimate philosopher for Pessoa/Caeiro is Christ himself. And here again, he manages to mirror Nietzsche surprisingly well. Pessoa/Caeiro adopts the dogmatic stripping down of Christ, colorfully employing it through funny and irreverent images. Christ is the boy Jesus who likes to play games and giggle and get into mischievous trouble, who speaks badly about heaven and its inhabitants just because he can, just because it is irreverent. He is not the man on the cross who is serious, speaking of the weight of sin and the price of glory. He is instead more like a Greek Daemon, who inspires Pessoa/Caeiro with his playfulness, or the Romantic concept of genius, like in Goethe. He calls things what they are, not refraining from calling the Father an old man, the Holy Spirit an ugly bird (because he is not a bird), the Virgin Mary a suitcase (and not a woman). He tricks everyone into thinking he's on the cross, but instead he is a hearty and playful child, who comes down to earth on a sunbeam and loves life, loves to look at things (and not anything behind the things). As a model, this Christ shows the Poet how to write poetry, because he inspires him to wonder at the world itself as it is, and not how the poet might wish it to be. He brings the poet into the divine child’s way of viewing the earth: an end to itself, maybe even as a gift.

In my opinion, Pessoa gets many things wrong, because of his fundamental reduction in epistemology. And yet, there is something in him that I keep coming back to again and again, especially now, on Substack. It seems as if we are programmed to always seek for deeper meanings, always look for hidden patterns. We are trained to be analytical from a young age, even rewarded for it. On Substack, there is a cacophony of different voices, all stating their opinions strongly, surely, polemically. We are engulfed by a wall of information, we are immersed in a sea of voices, some worth listening to, others not.

Perhaps, and I only say this tentatively, perhaps Pessoa, with his admonitions to slow down, to stop thinking, and to live holistically—perhaps this can help in a situation like ours. We don’t need to radically reduce our epistemological commitments to the extent that he suggests; we don’t need to flatten our ontologies and reject mysticism. But Pessoa brings us back to one of the church’s fundamental spiritual exercises: that of looking, or beholding. When we stop, when we behold, we take something of what we look at into ourselves. Looking is a unitive act, it is a participatory venture. We look, not to get behind the thing, but rather to actually encounter the thing. And to see that the thing is good, simply because it exists.

It actually in some ways reminds me of Maria Skobtsova’s description of the two great commandments. Or the Kantian dictum in his Critique of Practical Reason that human beings must not be used as ends. For both thinkers, the human face is the end-point, the goal of contemplation, not simply a mask to be pulled off or a visor to be seen through. Pessoa in a way extends this maxim to the whole of creation: that true love for the world will love the world for what it is, not for what it will become. That true philosophy will take the world for how it actually is, not for how we wish it might be.

There is something important about this sort of honest empiricism. I’ve always thought that if we take the things in front of us seriously enough, we will see that there is a depth to them, which doesn’t need to be added, but is rather constitutive of them. The depth of the potential-hypostatic, which is the potential-anthropic, which is, of course, the potential-divine.

Anyway, I hope you’ve enjoyed this post on Fernando Pessoa. I’ll include one of his short poems by way of conclusion.

What is my life worth? At the end (I don’t know what end)
One person says: I earned three hundred contos,
Another: I enjoyed three thousand days of glory,
Another: I was at ease with my conscience and that is enough . . .
And I, if they come and ask me what I have done,
Will say: I looked at things, nothing more.
And that is why I have the Universe here in my pocket.
And if God asks me: And what did you see in those things?
I will answer: Only things . . . You yourself added nothing else.
And God, who despite all is clever, will make me a new kind of saint.