If his racist message (ius sanguinis) did not pass into the discourse of the official historiography (A. Pimenta, C. Beirão, J. Ameal), it was because not only did it affront the imperial and colonialist view (the ius soli) of the Estado Novo, but because Sardinha himself in the final phase, after 1921-22, re-evaluated and limited its assertions, in particular about Judaism and the alleged Masonic alliance, which were always considered in any case to be promoters of the modern, utilitarian, Faustian civilisation of the capitalism of usury and interest – the ideal of the Pharisees in the language of Sardinha (“Occidentalism and Christianity”; NP, IV, t. I, n.º 4; 243-45) - which subverts the “spiritual”, for which read theological and scholastic, fundaments of ‘western civilization’: “Lords of Oil and Bituminous Coal, your imperialism – the imperialism of the Anglo-Saxons - blackens and depresses the breeding ground of those admirable energies, which issued forth from the Peninsula with its navigators and missionaries.”

Sardinha thus brings together the old monastic providentialism of the chronicles and the thaumaturgical creed of the epics, updating traditional metaphysical categories (infinity, time, fatality, teleology) with the modern concepts of environment and evolution and even of racial determinism and sociological fixism, an “indispensable method of work and of criticism”, which he believes he reads in Teófilo Braga, “master of the counter-revolution” and the much lauded theoriser of ordeirista (order-loving) and hierarchical, Comtian positivism, but he blames the author of the História da Literatura Portuguesa (History of Portuguese Literature) for his “inferior Jacobin acrimony towards the Braganza dynasty” and his “dogmatic republican convictions” (Glossário dos tempos, 1942; 124). Nevertheless, the appeal to any historical determinism scuttled the heteronymic and providentialist theses and their materialistic basis disagreed with the theosophical and messianic foundation that Sardinha, the integralist, advocated. The theses of the ‘eternal return’ merge within a system of radical beliefs which, in the name of a mythified past, seek to be updated to an ‘ought to be’: the becoming is therefore the overcoming, in its historical course, of the hiatus in the providential plan which Modernity and the revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries had corrupted.

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