In other words, there would be no hermeneutic erasures while heuristic support was present, and the absolutely real of the historical fact would be placed once more against the wise hermeneutic preventions of rationalism – apodicticity that would inaugurate authoritarian discourse in the historiographical field too, alongside scientific and positivist historicism, which in the name of another teleology rendered the anthropological promise of justice and peace in the earthly world immanent, commuting the Final Judgement by a procedural appeal to Jurors, meaning those now invested with the role of historians, the new judges of time and of human existence in time. The difficult epistemic division of subject / object, the basis of the complex investigation of the validity of historical knowledge, would be discarded in the name of the dogmatic efficacy of the belief in and the claim for a lack of temporality, let us say it like this, that takes root in an ahistorical view of the very thing it wanted to study: history.

Similar to and converging with literary nationalisation, as Sardinha had read in Afonso Lopes Vieira, he also sought to reaportuguesar Portugal (make Portugal Portuguese again) in terms of historiographical production, but following the Comtian maxim that it is the dead who rule the living, or rather, “it is the discipline of the Dead, it is their second life within us” (Ao ritmo da ampulheta, 155). This explains better the revisionist programme that Sardinha launched that targeted re-Christianisation and the fight against historiographical laicism in an attempt to demonstrate that the “unity of the race is more than evidenced in the unity of the Language and in the unity of Faith” (À sombra dos pórticos, cit., 47).

In an unedited extract later published in 1924, he recorded that “the history of Portugal in all its plenitude is nothing but a chapter in the history of the Church (…) our missionaries created Brazil – they reached the gates of Japan … But Faith was extinguished – and with the extinction of Faith, the Empire was lost. The history that remains afterwards is simply the history of its decline” (F. Campos, Os nossos mestres ou breviário da contra-revolução, 1924; 110-111). “In the renewal of Portuguese intelligence”, he wrote in that same year in his most important work, “history is today understood as the most decisive element of our nationalism. Like unfounded lies flow the calumnies randomly spread by the Dedução Cronológica-Analítica (Chronological-Analytical Deduction) when Pombal decided to discredit the moralising and cultural activity of the Company of Jesus through the most underhand means possible. This is when sectarian history begins amongst us (…). The manner in which the homens de 34 (men of 1834) unscrupulously denigrated their defeated brothers can be clearly seen by the rancour with which the republic maligns everything that represents a reflection of our Catholic and monarchical past” (Ao princípio era o Verbo, 1924; 240-41).

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